1962-1970

Kogelnik moved to New York in September 1962, after spending the summer in California, and quickly became friends with the emerging generation of artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann who would come to define American Pop Art. Her work was created during the time of the Space Race and the Cold War and featured the silhouettes of human bodies and limbs painted in bright block colors as she imagined the promise of a new futuristic world in outer space. This utopian space remains haunted by the prospect of war where alongside free-floating bodies, bombs fall and stylized skulls loom. Thinking about how the body could survive in this new environment, she proposed physical adaption and augmentation leading to ideas of the hybrid body, the cyborg and the robot; paintings, works on paper and sculptures were made using new methods, materials and found and altered objects. Later, the silhouettes she had created drawing around the prone bodies of friends were cut out of flat vinyl and draped over clothes hangers or hung in multiples on clothing racks, some augmented with similarly rendered body parts and systems.