Kunstverein Hamburg presents Kunstverein Hamburg presents Kiki Kogelnik. I Have Seen the Future a solo show on view September 15–December 30, 2012.
Kiki Kogelnik, I Have Seen the Future, 2012. Installation view Kunstverein Hamburg. Photo: Fred Dott / Kunstverein Hamburg. © Kiki Kogelnik Foundation Vienna/New York.
s the first extensive appraisal of the oeuvre of Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997) in Germany. The exhibition continues Kunstverein’s series of enquiries into positions of feminist art at the time and in circles associated with Pop Art, which began in 2011 with the solo show on Evelyne Axell (1935–1972). As a contemporary art institution, the Kunstverein’s mission is not only to present young art but also to place present-day artistic output in a historical context. The majority of the almost 90 exhibited works presented in the exhibition can be considered “Pop-related works,” whereby the exhibition focuses on the 1960s and thus on a relatively short but intense period in Kiki Kogelnik’s oeuvre. The pictorial worlds on canvas or paper are strongly influenced by Pop Art, though she in fact developed her own subjects and visual vocabulary, which she then pursued for a further 30 years and realized using different media. Kogelnik relocated to New York in the early 1960s and her personal acquaintance with countless Pop artists and her familiarity with the social debates of the day form the backdrop to her artistic effort. Our focus on this timeframe helps to structure the different currents in her work as well as highlighting central stylistic features and emphatic and expressive artistic forms. It was not only topics of the day that found their way into her works, but also materials taken from the consumer world. She swiftly replaced the gestural expression of painting with the slogan “art comes from artificial.” She used strident, luminescent neon colors; her themes were frequently built on colored grids of dots in line with the Benday dots encountered in Pop Art; she applied the paint very evenly, using spray cans for example, and often relied on vinyl or other plastic foils. Her works on canvas increasingly morphed into assemblages that protruded well beyond the borders of the image and featured combinations of different materials.
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