In Rainy, 1973, Kiki Kogelnik presents a vividly stylized female figure striding through a field of rain that falls, paradoxically, only within the boundaries of her umbrella. Executed in oil and acrylic on canvas, the painting exemplifies Kogelnik’s distinctive blend of Pop formalism and subversive wit. Rainy corresponds with a pivotal moment for Kogelnik, who was the subject of two major solo exhibitions in 1973: one in the United States, at the Henri Gallery in Washington, D.C., and another abroad—her first major museum retrospective—at the Künstlerhaus Klagenfurt in her native Austria. The painting belongs to an important group of works begun the year prior, in which Kogelnik engaged feminist perspectives on representations of the female body, appropriating idealized images from fashion magazines. Rainy, as well as a lithograph edition with the same title and subject from 1977, was exhibited in Kogelnik’s solo presentation at New York’s Jack Gallery in the spring of 1977. Acquired in the year it was made and held in the same family collection for over five decades, Rainy now makes its auction debut.

Born in the small town of Graz in 1935, Kogelnik studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and traveled across Europe before settling in Manhattan in the early 1960s. Energized by the city’s artistic vitality—set against the background of the Cold War and the Space Race—Kogelnik’s practice entered a prolific phase.  Introduced to the New York scene by Sam Francis, whom she had met while in Paris, Kogelnik quickly became a fixture at art world gatherings and formed friendships with Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann, among others. Andy Warhol, writing about her in 1964, simply repeated the word “Great” twenty-five times.ⁱ In a 1996 interview, Kogelnik reflected: “I was on the side-lines of what was going on—I was appreciated by the people, but I was not one of the Pop Artists. I didn’t want to be, and I wasn’t.”ⁱⁱ This sentiment is hardly surprising. As a European who had lived through the war in Austria and its aftermath, she was resistant to the celebratory commercialism that defined much of American Pop. Instead, she refashioned found objects and motifs into layered cultural critiques. Her sensibility aligned more closely with the French Nouveaux Réalistes—many of whom she also knew—who incorporated everyday materials to reveal ideological undercurrents. As she stated in 1966: “I’m not involved with Coca Cola… I’m involved in the technical beauty of rockets, people flying in space and people becoming robots. When you come from Europe, it is so fascinating… like a dream of our time. The new ideas are here, the materials are here, why not use them?”ⁱⁱⁱ During this early period, she produced her now-iconic Hangings, consisting of colored vinyl cut-outs—skin-like silhouettes suspended from hangers and rails, or stenciled onto canvas.

“I tell people what’s coming, they laugh and then two years later they say ‘you were right.’ I guess I just have a sense for time and what expresses it.”

—Kiki Kogelnik

Kogelnik’s image and persona also became part of her artistic strategy. Oldenburg recalled her wearing outfits made of “new kinds of materials such as fake fur or vinyl, which turned her into a kind of walking work of art,” describing a visit where she arrived in a black-and-white cowhide dress—“either the style of the times or art.”^iv News articles portrayed her similarly: a 1965 Women’s Wear Daily feature opened, “Kiki Kogelnik came into the Fischbach Gallery in her Jacques Kaplan black broadtail dress and jockey cap.”^v Kogelnik often wore flamboyant clothing, including aviator-style caps similar to the bright orange swim cap worn by the woman in Rainy. The figure’s confident posture, half-seen face, and assertive silhouette recall photographs of Kogelnik taken at her 1973 exhibition opening. Like Warhol, she cultivated a persona that blurred the line between art and identity. In her sharp yet theatrical critiques of femininity, fashionable dress and editorial poses became essential tools of self-dramatization.

Throughout the early 1970s, Kogelnik confronted gender inequality and the “boys’ club” ethos of the Pop art world by producing a series of large-scale paintings featuring lithe, dead-eyed women that parody fashion models from commercial media. Rainy exemplifies this mode. With its eye-catching flatness and billboard-like clarity, the figure adopts a stylized pose—walking on tiptoe, gripping an umbrella with both hands. Her face, seen in profile, is mask-like: enlarged cartoonish eyes, vivid lips, and flat planes accentuate her artificiality. Like a mannequin or magazine cutout, she exudes surface polish but resists inner life. As Kogelnik imagined futuristic utopias, she also revealed contemporary ideals of womanhood to be equally fabricated. Her oft-cited remark—“art comes from artificial, because it is not nature”—underscores this tension.^vi

“How many female Pop artists do you know?” asked Stephen Hepworth, director of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.^vii “It was very male-dominated. The women were always the secretary, the assistant, the wife, the girlfriend.”^viii Kogelnik’s work, emerging during the height of Second-Wave Feminism, is steeped in ironic humor and laced with political undercurrents. Yet, she never formally allied herself with the feminist movement, instead echoing Meret Oppenheim’s belief that “art has no gender characteristics.”^ix At first glance, Rainy conforms to Pop’s aesthetics: clean outlines, high-saturation color, and stylized femininity. But its logic swiftly unravels. The umbrella—conventionally a symbol of protection—becomes the very thing that confines her. Rain falls only within its canopy, turning a shelter into a trap. This irony is emblematic of Kogelnik’s practice: she reveals how mechanisms of comfort and control often coexist. The figure’s poised stride belies the fact that she is walking through a self-contained storm—a metaphor for the emotional contradictions demanded by modern femininity.

“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

The painting resonates closely with contemporaneous works such as Superwoman, 1973, in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Superserpent, 1974, in the Museum Ortner, Vienna. These paintings, along with the later It Hurts series (1974–1976), depict women in assertive, often intimidating poses, dressed in androgynous or militarized outfits. Some wield weapons or appear the victims of them; others possess mythical attributes like Medusa-like hair. Yet what gives these figures their visual dominance is not exaggerated scale, but the compositional pressure Kogelnik exerts on them. Across these works, as in Rainy, she flattens space and brings her subjects up against the upper edge of the canvas—be it the top of a head, the tip of an umbrella, or the brim of a hat. The painted ground beneath them reads as theatrical rather than natural, contributing to a visual constriction that generates latent tension. These women do not expand into space—they are pressed into it. While Superwoman and Superserpent display their power through costuming and symbolism, the figure in Rainy wields irony. Her solitary rainstorm, confined to her umbrella, becomes a metaphor for internalized constraint. Her swimsuit is impersonal, utilitarian; her expression unreadable. Rainy shares with Kogelnik’s other heroines a refusal of eroticism, an uncanny detachment, and a formal claustrophobia—but its resistance is conceptual, not theatrical. She does not command space; she occupies it with quiet unease. Whether through cut vinyl silhouettes, futuristic fantasies, or mannequin-like heroines, Kogelnik’s work reveals the psychic infrastructure beneath the polished surface. In Rainy, that surface breaks—subtly, beautifully—under the weight of its own contradictions.

Collector’s Digest 

• In August 2023, Kiki Kogelnik: Now Is the Time, a major retrospective featuring approximately 140 works, opened at Kunstmuseum Brandts in Odense, Denmark. The exhibition later traveled to Kunsthaus Zürich, where it was on view from March to July 2024.


• From May to August 2024, Pace Gallery hosted Kiki Kogelnik: The Dance, the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in London.


• In 2022, Kogelnik was featured in the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, at the 59th Venice Biennale.


• Her work is held in major international collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; mumok, Vienna; the Pinault Collection, Paris/Venice; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 
ⁱ Stephen Hepworth and Chris Sharp, Video Transcript: “Stephen Hepworth, Director of Kiki
Kogelnik Foundation, talks about the life and work of Kiki Kogelnik, and her exhibition 'Riot of
Objects' at MOSTYN,” MOSTYN, Llandudno, North Wales, n.d., online.
ⁱⁱ Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in ibid.
ⁱⁱⁱ Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in Cathérine Hug, “A Walking Work of Art,” Kiki Kogelnik: Now is The Time, Germany, 2023, p. 149; cites Carol Bjorkman, Women's Wear Daily, New York, June 22, 1966, p. 12.
^iv Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in Cathérine Hug, “A Walking Work of Art,” Kiki Kogelnik: Now is The Time, Germany, 2023, p. 147; cites Claes Oldenburg, “Statements,” in Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Kiki Kogelnik: Retrospektive, 1935-1997, Vienna, 1998, p.144.
^v Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in Cathérine Hug, “A Walking Work of Art,” Kiki Kogelnik: Now is The Time, Germany, 2023, p. 149; cites Carol Bjorkman, Women's Wear Daily, New York, June 22, 1966, p. 12.
^vi Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in Pace Gallery, “Kiki Kogelnik: The Dance,” Exhibition Text, 2024, online.
^vii Stephen Hepworth, Hannah McGivern, “Kiki Kogelnik: the 'secret' Austrian Pop artist who made out-of-this-world art,” The Art Newspaper, London Gallery Weekend 2024, May 29 2024, online.
^viii Ibid.
^ix Méret Oppenheim, quoted in Hatje Kantz, “Meret Oppenheim,” n.d., online.