Kiki Kogelnik: I Have Seen the Future
Texts by Angela Stief, Annette Tietenberg, Florian Waldvogel
Designed by Christoph Steinegger
English and German
2012, 216 pages, 100 ills.
24.50 x 16.50 cm
Softcover
Snoeck Verlag
ISBN 978-3-86442-024-5
Available through Snoeck Verlag
Rockets, guns, body fragments, collages, stencils, spray paints and crazy colors are the characteristic elements that populate Kiki Kogelnik’s multicolored universe. Kogelnik was born in 1935 in Graz and grew up in Bleiburg, Carinthia, Austria. After her time at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she left for the USA in 1961, ultimately settling in New York City in 1962. The East-Coast Pop Art canon, popularised by her male counterparts at this time, resonates in her work. But contrary to the material games or pronounced brand fetishism of her contemporaries, the young Kogelnik hoisted the standard of expanding consciousness and, from Pop Art’s very inception, viewed the relationship between the love of technology and conquest mentality with an extremely critical eye. It is possible to see this in her paintings, alternatively they can be read as critical statements, as well as a naïve contemporary witness to sixties’ euphoria. Utopia is the magic watchword that sums up Kiki Kogelnik’s formal and thematic peregrinations; she is interested in transformation, in overcoming the perplexities of space and time, and she always considered the present to be the start of a better future.