MoMA Acquires 1960s Painting

New York, USA

We are delighted to announce the acquisition of Kiki Kogelnik’s M (1964) by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Made two years after Kogelnik settled in New York, M is a painting made at the creative height of her imagining of the promise of a new, futuristic world in outer space. In this painting, she begins to look at the body itself, proposing physical adaption and augmentation as a means of survival, leading perhaps to the hybrid body of the cyborg, and ultimately to the totally artificial construction of the robot. The ‘M’ in the painting’s title is a coded reference to the South American businessman, Manuel Ulloa Elías, who Kogelnik was having an affair with at the time. His silhouette is outlined in vivid orange, while Kogelnik’s form appears headless in turquoise marked with a large green ‘M’, her hand reaching out for intimate and sustained connection.

Kunsthaus Zürich Acquires Early 1970s Painting

Zurich, Switzerland

We are delighted to announce the acquisition of Kiki Kogelnik’s Express (1972) by the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland.

During the 1970s, Kogelnik’s paintings focused on the portrayal of women as they appeared within the pages of fashion magazines. She created 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 background, dressed in fiercly patterned clothing like paper dolls, their dynamic poses contrast with their manic fixed painted faces and eyes that no longer appear to harbor any humanity. They echo Kogelnik’s interest in the idea of the cyborg from the previous decade, and are and have, in her own words: “beautiful, rich, worldly, superficial, bored, neither happy nor unhappy, no deep thoughts, no sentiment, no feelings.”

Express is now on view at the Kunsthaus Zürich as part of the permanent collection in the Chipperfield Building alongside paintings by Andy Warhol and Franz Gertsch that bring together American and European Pop Art.

Art Basel 2025

Pace
Booth A30, Grand Palais, Paris, France
October 22 – October 26, 2025

There is an archival photograph from 1978 which shows Kiki Kogelnik in her New York studio. Behind her is her painting Untitled (It Hurts) (1974) on whose surface she has taped various brown paper stencils, as if a further development of the work was planned. However, the additions that the stencils suggest were not realized.

Untitled (It Hurts) (1974) is included in Pace’s presentation at Art Basel in Paris to be found on booth A30 at the Grand Palais from October 22 to 26, 2025.

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.

To Open Eyes: Artists’ Gaze

Centre Pompidou Málaga
Málaga, Spain
July 3, 2025 – January 31, 2027

Kiki Kogelnik’s Female Robot (1964) is included in the exhibition To Open Eyes: Artists’ Gaze at the Centre Pompidou Málaga. In 1940, Josef Albers, a German born artist and teacher living in the United States declared that art tells us that we must “learn to see and feel life”. For him, art was inseparable from life and encourages us to “open our eyes”. To Open Eyes examines the ways in which artists invite us to decenter our gaze and thus transform our relationship with art, society, and the world. The exhibition, curated by Valentina Moimas and Anne-Charlotte Michaut, is a free journey that offers an open and comprehensive overview of the major movements and ruptures that have marked the history of art in the 20th and 21st centuries, leading to recent creations that signal some of today’s challenges.

Tideline – Works from the Collection

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Humlebæk, Denmark
June 18 – September 14, 2025

Kiki Kogelnik’s Liquid Injection Thrust (1965) was recently acquired by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, and can currently be seen in their exhibition Tideline – Works from the Collection. This presentation draws from the museum’s collection of over 4,000 works to offer a walk through the historical part of the collection, from classics through Op Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Pop Art, and to the present day. Kogelnik’s painting is on view together with her sculpture Bomb (1964) as well as with works by Martial Raysse, Andy Warhol, Dorothy Iannone, amongst others.

Pop Models

Museum MORE
Gorssel, The Netherlands
June 22 – September 28, 2025

Kiki Kogelnik’s Woman Astronaut (c. 1964) is included in the exhibition Pop Models at the Museum MORE (Museum for Modern Realism) in Gorssel, The Netherlands. For the curators, Julia Dijkstra and Feico Hoekstra, advertisements, comic strips, bold colors, and women were the defining elements of Pop Art in the 1960s and early 1970s; and the role of women in Pop Art was twofold, perhaps even ambiguous. Women were at once supermodels and role models, both muses and makers. The exhibition focuses on Europe, where the Pop Art movement was seen as more outspoken and socially engaged than its US American counterpart. Further artists included are, amongst others: Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Richard Hamilton, Ketty La Rocca and Jana Želibská.

Les yeux dans les yeux

Pinault Collection, Couvent des Jacobins
Rennes, France
June 14 – September 14, 2025

Kiki Kogelnik’s The Painter (1975) is included in the Pinault Collection’s exhibition Les yeux dans les yeux at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, France. It is curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, features 43 artists and includes almost 90 works. Its focus lies on the human figure through the mediums of painting, drawing, photography, and film to explore tensions, trajectories, emotions, revolts, feelings, conditioning, love and violence. Central to the concept of the show is the confrontation between the viewer and the art, as the title states: the aspect of seeing ‘eye to eye’. Further artists included are, amongst others: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Miriam Cahn, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Annie Leibovitz, Irving Penn, Alina Szapocznikow, Cindy Sherman and Zhang Huan.

Chorus

lumber room
Portland, USA
May 3 – July 19, 2025

Kiki Kogelnik’s painting Dom Perignon 1 (1977) is included in the group exhibition Chorus at the lumber room, Portland. Comprised of figurative work from the Miller Meigs Collection, the show is described as “a choreography of bodies—bending, twisting, and contorting—all together trying to make sense of a changing world”. Further artists included in the show are, amongst others: Janine Antoni, Olga Balema, Lynda Benglis, Martha Jungwrith, Hayv Kahraman, Simone Leigh, Ana Mendieta, Pipilotti Rist.

Pom Pom Pidou

Le Tripostal
Lille, France
April 26 – November 9, 2025

With Pom Pom Pidou, in the context of the 7th edition of the triennial lille3000, the Centre Pompidou is taking over one of the most iconic art venues in Lille: Le Tripostal. The exhibition uses the collection from the Centre Pompidou as a starting point for unveiling the story of modern and contemporary art on all three levels of the venue. It features 240 works, from Sonia Delaunay to Daniel Buren and Marcel Duchamp to Kiki Kogelnik, and seeks to shake up art and particularly the ‘white cube’. Pom Pom Pidou is curated by Jeanne Brun, Deputy Director of Collections at the Centre Pompidou, and Jean-Max Colard, Head of ‘Service de la Parole’ (Talks & Lectures) at the Centre Pompidou and artistic advisor for lille3000.

The Impermanent: Four Takes on the Collection

Museum of Modern Art Warsaw
Warsaw, Poland
February 21 – August 31, 2025

The Impermanent: Four Takes on the Collection is the first exhibition to fully occupy the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw’s acclaimed new building that opened to the public in October 2024. Kiki Kogelnik’s painting Woman and Scissors, 1964, is included in the second chapter of the exhibition: Synthetic Materialities: Body, Commodity and Fetish from the Cold War to the Present. It contains works expressing consumerist desires, a fascination with pop culture, advertising and mass media—not only in societies that experienced the economic boom and the onslaught of consumerism after World War II, but also among the poorer “peripheral” countries of Eastern Europe and the Global South. The exhibition was curated by Sebastian Cichocki, Tomasz Fudala, Magda Lipska, Szymon Maliborski, Łukasz Ronduda and Natalia Sielewicz.

The Monster

Pace
Los Angeles, USA
February 1 – March 22, 2025

The Monster is an exhibition curated by artist Robert Nava with Pace’s Chief Curator Oliver Shultz that brings together paintings, sculptures, and works on paper celebrating monstrous bodies and fabulations of monstrosity in contemporary art by an intergenerational group of artists including Huma Bhabha, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Jean Debuffet, Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Kiki Kogelnik, Robert Longo, Paul McCarthy, Ugo Rondinone, Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Paul Thek.

Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…

Fondation Louis Vuitton
Paris, France
October 17, 2024 – February 24, 2025

Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &… is an exhibition dedicated to Pop Art, one of the major artistic movements of the 1960s whose influence continues to be felt across all continents and amongst all generations. The exhibition, curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, is centered around Tom Wesselmann and also features works by 35 artists of different generations and nationalities who share a common sensibility for “Pop”, including Kiki Kogelnik, Jasper Johns, Marisol, Roy Lichtenstein, Marcel Duchamp, Ai Weiwei, Mickalene Thomas.