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Lot Essay
'My ladies are contemporary. […] They like to get away from the problems of daily life in this technologically advanced century. They are urban and sophisticated, cool and unattached.' - Kiki Kogelnik
Superserpent is exemplary of Kiki Kogelnik’s work in the 1970s, the period in which she answered to second-wave Feminism by creating images of women that appropriate the cliché beauty found in commercial advertising, whilst simultaneously casting an ironic light on it. The figure in this work clearly references a fashion model and echoes the flatness of Kogelnik’s Pop Art contemporaries. However, its appearance is intimidating – the woman has a Medusa-like head and brandishes a snake and rod. As with similar works from that time (such as Superwoman, 1973, in the National Museum of Women in the Art) these women are empowered either by mythical symbolism or are portrayed smoking, wearing fighter pilot outfits, and - later - holding threatening weapons in the series ‘It Hurts’. Just as she defied association with any particular art movement, Kogelnik also never fully committed herself to Feminism but rather shared Meret Oppenheim’s belief that ‘art has no gender characteristics’.
Born in Austria in 1935, Kogelnik studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art and travelled Europe before settling in Manhattan in the early 1960s. She became friends with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns – who no doubt inspired her, though she always claimed her own realm of creative practice. During this time she created her now iconic Hangings, consisting of cut-out silhouettes of her friends which she then hung skin-like on hangers and rails, or stenciled onto canvas.
Transcending the movements of European abstract modernism and American Pop art, Kiki Kogelnik built a unique and innovative oeuvre that addressed post-war consumer society, technology and feminism, which is even more relevant today.
Superserpent is exemplary of Kiki Kogelnik’s work in the 1970s, the period in which she answered to second-wave Feminism by creating images of women that appropriate the cliché beauty found in commercial advertising, whilst simultaneously casting an ironic light on it. The figure in this work clearly references a fashion model and echoes the flatness of Kogelnik’s Pop Art contemporaries. However, its appearance is intimidating – the woman has a Medusa-like head and brandishes a snake and rod. As with similar works from that time (such as Superwoman, 1973, in the National Museum of Women in the Art) these women are empowered either by mythical symbolism or are portrayed smoking, wearing fighter pilot outfits, and - later - holding threatening weapons in the series ‘It Hurts’. Just as she defied association with any particular art movement, Kogelnik also never fully committed herself to Feminism but rather shared Meret Oppenheim’s belief that ‘art has no gender characteristics’.
Born in Austria in 1935, Kogelnik studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art and travelled Europe before settling in Manhattan in the early 1960s. She became friends with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns – who no doubt inspired her, though she always claimed her own realm of creative practice. During this time she created her now iconic Hangings, consisting of cut-out silhouettes of her friends which she then hung skin-like on hangers and rails, or stenciled onto canvas.
Transcending the movements of European abstract modernism and American Pop art, Kiki Kogelnik built a unique and innovative oeuvre that addressed post-war consumer society, technology and feminism, which is even more relevant today.