Kiki Kogelnik

Biography

Kiki Kogelnik was born in Graz in 1935 and was raised in Bleiburg, Carinthia. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and mounted her first one-woman-show in the Galerie St. Stephan. From the middle of the fifties she belonged to the avant-garde group around Otto Mauer, in whose Galerie St. Stephan she attracted attention with her gay but critical street scenes, together with the 1967 exhibition Kunst kommt von Künstlich” (Art comes from Artificial). She moved to New York in 1961 where she soon established herself in the art scene and where her works were exhibited in numerous exhibitions. From then on she commuted between New York, Vienna and Bleiburg. Alongside her large-scale pictures she also created a large oeuvre in graphics, ceramics, sculptures and installations. Kiki Kogelnik first began to work with glass in Murano in 1994 and also began to produce her first works in bronze soon afterwards. Kiki Kogelnik died in 1997 in Vienna. In 1998 the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere showed a large retrospective of her life’s work. In the course of the exhibition she was posthumously awarded the Austrian Honorary Cross for Science and Art.