By her early twenties, the Austrian born Kiki Kogelnik had become an inveterate traveler; crisscrossing Europe with her college friends such as Hans Hollein and Peter Kubelka in a shared car, hitchhiking, taking trains, buses or boats. Her passport from that period is littered with entry and exit stamps and provides evidence of a quest for a place outside of war-scarred Vienna and its constricting values. Having studied art at both the Academy of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna alongside Maria Lassnig and Arnulf Rainer—she was engaged to the latter at the age of 21—she soaked in the art that she saw and delighted in the people she met. In the last six months of 1959, she travelled to Italy, France, Denmark, Norway, England, and Ireland. While in Paris, she met Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis with the French sculptor César. Francis had been living in Paris since 1950, where he had become a bilingual participant in the ever-expanding scene of artists, writers, curators and collectors. The city provided both a powerful artistic and intellectual legacy as well as the impetus to create the new. Kogelnik travelled with artist materials, making work where she could, returning to Austria with new ideas eager to try them out. Her work—originally a somber palette of abstract forms that reflected the influence of a circle of postwar avant-garde artists—connected with the Viennese Galerie nächst St. Stephan, soon became looser and more colorful.
Kiki Kogelnik on Staten Island Ferry, New York, 1963 Opposite page: Kiki Kogelnik in Paris, France, 1950s 7