KIKI KOGELNIK’S FEMINIST POP DESERVES ITS PLACE IN ART HISTORY

By Alina Cohen

Kiki Kogelnik, Self Portrait, 1964. Courtesy of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

Like other mid-century Pop artists, Kiki Kogelnik became a brand. And while the Austrian-born artist should primarily be remembered for her innovative “Hangings” series and her bold feminist motifs, history hasn’t been kind to her. In the United States, Kogelnik’s legacy unfairly rests more on her fashionable image and vibrant personality than on her work itself.

Born in Bleiburg, Austria, in 1935, Kogelnik attended Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and began her career painting quiet abstractions. She moved to New York in 1961 at the suggestion of her friend, painter Sam Francis, and her work took a colorful turn. Influenced by the city’s commercialism and the burgeoning Pop movement, Kogelnik made science fiction-inflected paintings featuring floating bodies, polka dots, robot parts, and the cosmos. She worked out of Francis’s studio for a few years, mingling with the other artists who came through and easily integrated into the city’s cultural milieu. Her friends included major figures, from Andy Warhol to Larry Rivers.

According to a pamphlet she preserved in a giant black scrapbook of personal ephemera (which she titled her “Ego Book”), composer Morton Feldman once said, “Kiki is the love goddess of pop art…her paintings continue the legacy of a ‘Marilyn Monroe.’” If Kogelnik relished the praise, it didn’t help her reputation as a serious artist. “She was kind of an outlier, even though she knew everyone,” Pilar Zevallos, the director of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, tells Artsy.

News articles similarly portrayed her as a well-dressed muse or woman about town. As the lede for a September 1965 Women’s Wear Daily article about one of her gallery shows began, “Kiki Kogelnik came into the Fischbach Gallery in her Jacques Kaplan black broadtail dress and jockey cap.” Kogelnik tells the writer, Carol Bjorkman, that she’s painted a heart-shaped beauty mark on her face because she’s a painter.

Kogelnik, like Warhol before her, was a multidisciplinary artist attempting to merge art with persona. Yet Kogelnik wound up in the society pages, while her work never entered the annals of American art history. “It was really hard for a female artist to create a name, and the fact that she was fluid in her practice and also did performances did not help,” gallerist Simone Subal told Artsy. “She really resists categorization.”

Kiki Kogelnik, Seventh Ave. People, 1970. Courtesy of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation and Simone Subal Gallery, New York.

Subal is attempting to raise Kogelnik’s profile through a series of shows devoted to the artist. “We are deliberately trying to focus on the work that has been forgotten and that has not been visible for such a long time,” she says. Subal herself is from Austria, where Kogelnik’s name enjoys some celebrity. Yet even the gallerist was at first hesitant to champion her fellow countrywoman……………….

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