Sixties Surreal
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, USA
September 24, 2025 – January 19, 2026
Kiki Kogelnik’s painting Gee Baby – I’m Sorry (1965) is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Sixties Surreal. The presentation is a reappraisal of American art from 1958 to 1972, that looks beyond established canonical movements to focus instead on the era’s aesthetic current–an efflorescence of psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies, underpinned by the imprint of historical Surrealism and its broad dissemination. The exhibition recontextualizes some of the decade’s best-known figures alongside those only recently rediscovered. In the 60s, many of these artists sought new strategies for connecting art back to a lived reality that seemed increasingly unreal due to rapid postwar transformation and the social, political, and technological upheavals.
Kogelnik’s painting demonstrates her interst in the enhanced human body, suggesting mechanical augmentation, limb replacement and joint improvement in a aquest to achieve a cyborgian form ready to survive in the anticipated utopia of outer space.
Sixties Surreal is organized by Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman, with Kelly Long and Rowan Diaz-Toth. The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial catalogue that chronologically maps the ‘Long Sixties’ through political, social and artistic changes and developments.