Outer Space

Kiki Kogelnik studied in Austria and soon moved to New York, where she found a community of artists with whom to engage, including, among others, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. However, in a period marked by the Cold War and the space race, she set herself apart from the language of Pop Art by focusing on technology and its relationship to the body, especially in the representation of women's bodies. 

Her works, such as Outer Space, painted in 1964, describe a world where “technobodies” float weightlessly, projected among other coloured forms in outer space. She drew from a technical and advertising aesthetic as well as science fiction to create a formal vocabulary of silhouettes and shapes that she used in both paintings and sculptures. In the 1970s, she also made archetypal, female ceramic heads that were also slightly psychedelic, such as Sleepy Head. Her feminist and political discourse became increasingly pronounced over time.

The Pinault Collection first showed this work in 2023 at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, as part of the exhibition Forever Sixties.