Kiki Kogelnik: Women
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
New York, USA
June 1 – July 8, 2022
The Kiki Kogelnik Foundation is pleased to announce the second solo presentation of the work of Kiki Kogelnik at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. The exhibition Kiki Kogelnik: Women shifts the focus to the 1970s and her ideas about how women were seen and treated in the world at that time.
Drawing on the images found within the pages of fashion magazines, in the 1970s she embarked on a series of paintings that showed their subjects as both empowered and absurd as they performed their assigned roles. Stripped of the context of a photoshoot, dressed in fiercely patterned dresses and bathing suits, augmented by the occasional prop, their dynamic poses contrast with their painted faces, and eyes that no longer appear to harbor any emotion. Echoing her interest in the idea of the cyborg from the previous decade, they are in her own words: “beautiful, rich, worldly, superficial, bored, neither happy nor unhappy, no deep thoughts, no sentiment, no feelings.”
The exhibition includes 10 paintings and 21 works on paper that date from 1962 to 1985 that explore: her fascination with Marilyn Monroe, the body as a sexual object, pregnancy, beauty, glamor, abuse, the face, and the mask.