KIKI KOGELNIK: THE DANCE
Pace announces The Dance by the artist Kiki Kogelnik, the first solo presentation of the pioneering artist’s work in London. The exhibition showcases Kogelnik’s unique, futuristic visual language as a means in which to communicate the universal fragility of terrestrial life.
May 23 - August 3, 2024
This exhibition, whose title draws inspiration from the allegorical Danse Macabre, or the Dance with Death, will include works across various mediums that are emblematic of Kogelnik’s profound exploration of the future possibilities—and perils—of outer space, and her relationship to the altered and abstracted twentieth-century body.
Kogelnik's singular visual language of weightless bodies, geometric repetition, and vibrant, neon colours defies categorisation. Born in Austria in 1935, she relocated to New York in the early 196Os, where she was introduced to artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann. Charged by the city's artistic vitality-set against the pervasive background of the Cold War and Space Race-Kogelnik's practice surged into a prolific phase of creative development.
Pace's upcoming exhibition in London will include a suite of chromatic paintings that speak to Kogelnik's fascination with space travel and her desire to be free. Bomb for Alfonso (1962), last seen at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, Brutal in Outer Space (c. 1962-63), and Untitled (Skull) (1960-63), encapsulate Kogelnik's mixed sentiments to the burgeoning technologies of the 1960s.
To create these life-size forms that populate her paintings, Kogelnik traced around bodies-sometimes her own, and sometimes those of her acquaintances-in a process akin to photography that she described as 'taking'. Enhancing their mechanistic quality, the tape Kogelnik used to secure her cutouts remains delineated, suggesting that the figures and their extra limbs resemble both garments for paper dolls and integral components of a larger machine.
A body of twelve drawings included in The Dance that feature these stamps portray their eponymous Robots in narrative sequence: their creation; their ascension into space and journey to other planets; the nirvana of celestial travel and their subsequent transformation; and finally, their fall and destruction. Circles permeate these works, from the glowing spheres around which body parts orbit, to smaller, clustered beads redolent of medical blister packs.
Like the ceramics also on view, their faces are mask-like. Blank, cutout eyes, boldly outlined lips, and smooth, flat surfaces assert the artificiality of the female ideal. Just as Kogelnik envisioned Space utopias, she likewise revealed the culturally constructed expectations of women's bodies as fantasy, otherwise expressed by her often-repeated maxim, "art comes from artificial, because it is not nature."