Lecture (DE)
Nicola L. meets Kiki Kogelnik: Similarities and differences

After formative years in Paris, Brussels and Ibiza, Nicola L. (b. 1932, El Jadida, as Nicole Jeannine Suzanne Leuthe; d. 2018, Los Angeles) moved to New York in 1979 and lived in New York's famous Chelsea Hotel for almost thirty years from 1989. The city had been a centre of her work and exchange with other artists since the late 1960s. The Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik (b. 1935, Graz; d. 1997, Vienna) also relocated to the city in the early 1960s and quickly became part of the young Pop Art scene there. In addition to their geographical proximity, the two contemporaries' decidedly feminist approaches, artistic reflection on the human body, proximity to Pop Art and close connection between art and life reveal parallels in terms of content. Whether Nicola L. and Kiki Kogelnik knew or met in person could not be conclusively answered by Dr. Lisa Ortner-Kreil, who curated the exhibition Now is the Time - Kiki Kogelnik at Kunstforum Wien in 2023, during research in the archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. In her lecture, she will explore what the two artists have in common in terms of their work, but also what makes them strikingly different.

Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Dr phil., is an art historian and literary scholar. After working at Vienna's MQ, the Albertina Vienna and the Royal Belgian Museums in Brussels, she has been a curator at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien since 2013, where she has organised several exhibitions, most recently Anton Corbijn: Favourite Darkness (2025) as well as Kiki Kogelnik: Now Is the Time (2023), which was also on show at Kunsthaus Zürich and Kunstmuseum Brandts in Odense, Denmark. In 2020, together with Barbara Horvath, Lisa Ortner-Kreil founded the art initiative art hoc projects, which brings high-calibre contemporary art to atypical locations.