Kiki Kogelnik: Now Is the Time

Kunstmuseum Brandts presents the first major retrospective solo exhibition by Kiki Kogelnik (1935–97) in Denmark, featuring some 140 works by the artist. Kogelnik’s fascination with outer space, the boundary between human and machine, and her questioning of established gender roles is more relevant than ever. 

The Austrian born Kiki Kogelnik is one of the most astonishing artists to emerge from the expanding art scene of the 1960s. Kogelnik’s work embraces all that is new, exuding both enthusiasm and apprehension. Her art orbits the porous boundary between human and machine, robots, nuclear war, gender roles, sexual liberation, popular culture, fashion, consumption and, not least, outer space as both a haven offering the possibility of transformation and zone for conflict. Aspects of this reality continue to preoccupy us today. When Kogelnik moved from Vienna to New York in 1962, she became part of the artistic circle that included artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Marisol Escobar and Claes Oldenburg. Today, Kiki Kogelnik is being rediscovered as a significant artist active at the time, but until recently, the work remained unknown by a wider audience. 

The exhibition entitled Kiki Kogelnik: Now Is the Time adds an important new chapter to the history of 1960s art in Europe and the US. The historiography of pop art has largely focused on a group of male artists, primarily from the United States. Kiki Kogelnik is one of many women artists who are finally finding their place in Western art history. In 2022, she was included in the main exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale. She is represented by the renowned global gallery Pace and New York-based Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Her works feature in the collections of several international museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, mumok in Vienna, the Pinault Collection in Paris/Venice, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. 

“The exhibition is a hugely important venture for Kunstmuseum Brandts. We are currently working with a more international exhibition program and an increased focus on collaborations with art institutions in Europe and abroad,” says Stine Høholt, Director of Kunstmuseum Brandts. 
 
Peace activism, space art and robots 
Several of Kogelnik’s works of the 1960s reflect on the military conflicts at the time. Her sculpture Bombs in Love from 1964 consists of two interconnected, painted upright bomb casings, and on each casing, she has mounted a plexiglass heart. In 1960s´ America, the space race was one of the programs that characterised the era of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union: “Kiki Kogelnik called her 1960s works ‘space art’ and with great enthusiasm and profound creativity she hacked into the space fever of the 1960s, to create her own version of history with an alternative space program populated by astronauts, love bombs and robot-like bodies flying freely in confetti-filled outer space. In her vision of the future, technology can be detached from warlike agendas and set humanity free. One of her major works from 1972 is entitled I Have Seen the Future. In the encounter with the work by this brilliant artist, whose bright light shines somewhat delayed, one certainly does not begrudge her that; that she really saw it—the future,” says Ellen Egemose, the exhibition’s curator.  

Kiki Kogelnik: Now Is the Time is accompanied by a richly illustrated 280-page catalogue published by Kehrer Verlag, featuring contributions from: Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Sylvie Fleury, Flavia Frigeri, Cathérine Hug, Marie Laurberg, Mai-Thu Perret and Birgitte Thorsen Vilslev. 
 
The exhibition is a project of Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien and is organised in cooperation with Kunstmuseum Brandts and Kunsthaus Zürich. The exhibition is made in close collaboration with the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation in New York.