Kodak Ghosts Run Amok:Kiki Kogelnik @ Pace.

There are no information boards, or even signs giving the works titles, whatsoever at Mayfair's Pace Gallery's ongoing Kiki Kogelnik:The Dance exhibition. None. What's an amateur arts blogger who's unfamiliar with Kogelnik supposed to make of that? There's some books you can flick through in the lobby of the gallery and I suppose there's the Internet. But, on the whole, I'm gonna have to wing it.

 

Which frees me up to write any old bullshit. But let's at least start with some facts. Kogelnik (1935-1997) was a reluctant pop artist who was born in Graz, Austria and came into contact with some of the abstract expressionists. It seems to that me her work tries to split the difference between abstract expression and pop art but ends up, despite her protestations, veering towards pop art.

For The Dance, inspired by the allegorical Danse Macabre - the dance with death, she's created a series of works that mostly show outlines, or shadows, of variously coloured and shaded human figures set against a backdrop of geometrical shapes, often circles, and sometimes with other hands and body parts reaching in, sometimes with words - FRAGILE crops up a lot, creeping in to the frame too.

They're pleasant enough looking but they won't detain most visitors long. Alongside them there are a few curios, drawings of coathangers, a clothes rack full of what appears to be rags, and what looks like a shedded human skin hung up on one of those oh so popular coathangers on the gallery wall. Is this a barbed comment about the futility, and vanity, of the fashion industry?

Who knows? I like the below works and not just because it's got girls in bikinis in it. It reminds me a bit of something Julian Opie or even the late great Patrick Caulfield would make. For me, high praise indeed. There's also some china (?) masks that stare out at the visitor from the wall with aghast or ecstatic impressions. It's difficult to read.

Oh, and there's what appears to be Wayne Hussey with a giant pair of scissors because why not? This one was in one of those books I mentioned earlier and it's called Women's Lib so I'm guessing it's a female Hussey clone but, again, who knows?

During Kogelnik's time in New York in the 1960s she met with the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann and that makes sense. You can see some influence in her work from those artists. She wasn't, however, keen on the 'boy's club' feel of that scene so she looked to give it a more female perspective. To be honest, many of her figures are either so vague, or in the case of Ms Hussey, so androgynous it's hard to say she has completely succeeded in this.

Some works took on an almost science fiction dimension. Some of the figures look like astronauts, dead astronauts even, and some of the paintings which include what appear to be hoover attachments or something appear to be making crude and basic points about augmented humanity.

Elsewhere there's a gun, always good for a pop artist, and a painting that looks a bit like an Etch-a-Sketch as well as one that reminded me of the long forgotten television series Credo. Some of the works are, cliche alert, riots of colour while others are more subdued and muted. They must have been fun to make and they were fun to look at too. Just not for that long. That would be consistent with pop art and in conclusion I have decided that whether or not she likes it, Kiki Kogelnik was a pop artist who made good pop art. No more (maybe a bit more), no less.