Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997) is considered to be one of the most important Austrian artists of the 20th century and the only Austrian protagonist of Pop Art, but her work goes far beyond this categorization. Her playful, colorful, and highly political approach ranges from painting, drawing, ceramics, and installation to performative practices, and has an astonishing topicality in terms of its subject matter.
Kogelnik settled in New York in 1962, where she began to work within the Pop Art movement and developed friendships with artists such as Roy Liechtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Carolee Schneeman.
Her works created during this period form the crucial center of the exhibition in which she explicitly addressed consumer society, technical progress, medicine and diagnostics, and the (female) body and its implications, as well as the reality of her own life as an artist, mother, and wife, starting in the early 1960s – long before today's omnipresent discourses on gender equality, medical ethics, the digital age, and sustainable lifestyles.
