Curated by Ciara Moloney

Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik understood the female body as a kind of technology, both operated by and producing femininity, female desire, and feminist militancy. Kogelnik (1935–1997), traveling between New York and Vienna, created a prescient and brazen body of work that expertly underlines gender as a scientific process as well as an aesthetic. See her articulate series of silhouettes cut from colored vinyl, as slick and synthetic as the modern anxiety they betrayed. See, too, her Tongue Operation, 1970, in which a mouth is propped luridly open with scissors. Late this summer, Modern Art Oxford will present the artist’s first UK survey, showing approximately fifty works—paintings, drawings, sculptures, and two films—created between 1961 and 1974 during Kogelnik’s vital American East Coast period, when her witty and political space-age Pop, as graphic as she wanted it to be, took off.

— Quinn Latimer