Kiki Kogelnik "Hangings"
"Claes" 1970 Artforum (Simone Subal show) "The piece, Hanging, by Kiki Kogelnik was made in 1970 as part of a series of cutouts traced from human forms and executed in silky, slick resins. A transplant to New York from Austria, Kogelnik settled downtown in 1962, where she befriended Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Carolee Schneemann, among others. (Claes, not on view here but made the same year as Hanging, takes the soft sculptor’s body as its template.) Her early art informel–style paintings quickly yielded to work that indexed the city’s emergent Pop aesthetic, grafting its concerns with high-tech materials, synthetic color, and transfer techniques such as silk-screening and stenciling onto her commitment to militant feminism. ...Scissors emerge as Kogelnik’s tool of choice, which she conceived of as both a surgical implement and a feminist weapon, in the manner of Valerie Solanas or Hannah Höch." Tate: "With a humorous and feminist take on a male-dominated art scene, she explored the human body and the construction of the self within the booming technological environment of post-war consumer society. Experimenting with found objects, assemblage, plastic and vinyl, while also spraying and printing on paper, Kogelnik developed a new visual language, increasingly characterised by weightlessness and the flattening of the human figures. This can be seen in her signature Hanging works and cut-out silhouettes of her friends, developed from the early 1960s."