Kiki Kogelnik

For the Bergers

1966

Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik moved to New York in the 1960s to get closer to the action and quickly fell in with the Pop art scene. Although she remains less well known than some of her contemporaries in that fiercely male arena, Kogelnik was radically creative and carved out a truly original body of work.

Kogelnik staged happenings, incorporated dystopian futuristic imagery in her paintings and prints, and experimented with materials like vinyl, all while retaining serious aesthetic appeal.

In the 1970s, Kogelnik began critiquing the representation of women in popular culture and turned her eye on fashion magazines, creating images of model-esque women with features slightly awry. The bathing beauty’s face in Bathing in Green, for example, is strangely cyborg-like.

“She was on the cutting edge in her time and just under-recognized — that’s changing,” says RoGallery's Jaime Villamarín, who notes that the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, just bought a major Kogelnik painting. “Her graphic work is still accessible, but there will be a time when it’s not.”

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