Kiki Kogelnik

As the first solo exhibition of Kiki Kogelnik’s work in a public institution in France, the show at BBB centre d’art is an unprecedented insight into the Austrian artist, focusing on her long-running practice of drawing. Her vibrant, engaged art was rooted in over forty years’ experience, with questions of emancipation or subjugation, of women in particular, in a hi-tech society at its core. The artistic paths she explored testify to her subversive and ironic, painful and liberating positions and mindset.

Kiki Kogelnik moved to New York City in the 1960s and embraced the revolutions of her times, first and foremost Pop Art. As a child of the war, and the losing side, her personal story collided headlong with her understanding of the world and its ongoing revolutions. The potential, and possible impact, of the development of consumer society, new technologies in the fields of war, science and communications – soft and hard power – and the American civil rights movement pervaded her work. The private is political. The artist and her many friends are always on display.

– Vivid, single-color vinyl cadavers. – Dissected organs with flip comments. – Selfportraits with fake ad glam. – Colorful and playful technoid imprints. – Anonymous, inactive, asexual, dispossessed communities. – Masks with chimerical beauties. – Non-binary incarnations. – Cyber organisms. – Human and/or Object and/or Subject and/or Machine. – Thanatos and/or Eros.

Kiki Kogelnik’s paintings, sculptures, installations, performances and drawings translate the complexity and strangeness of belonging to oneself, to others, to the collective, in an equivocal society. The promises of social progress on the ruins of a global armed conflict are also processes of de-liaison and a force for annihilation. "A life without art is a senseless life," according to Kiki Kogelnik, in the world of art where systems of cooption and invisibilization hampered the creator in her career. The visionary and aware work of Kiki Kogelnik is now finding its rightful place in artistic and cultural narratives.

A co-production with BBB centre d'art, with the support of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation New York and the Austrian Cultural Forum, with the participation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds.