"Sleep"

‘Each of my works contains a spiritual element, which may not necessarily be apparent at first glance… I cannot always explain it precisely, though I do hope you’ll find it in my works.’1 The spiritual element in ‘Sleep’ is a chameleon, or more accurately the animal’s skeleton, which is placed at the centre of the depiction as a fragmented pink form with sharp black contours. The figural parts are enclosed by a diffuse, bright background and framed by a dark green strip of colour that follows the line of the picture’s edges. Kiki Kogelnik has placed two watch hands into the uppermost layer of paint, which point at the skeleton like arrows. These hands are once again executed as ceramics to be fixed to the wall next to the picture. The artist originally developed the chameleon as a logo for New York’s ‘Temple Bar’. This was one of the gastronomic businesses of her husband George Schwarz2, along with the ‘NoHo Star’ restaurant, the ‘Elephant and Castle’ in Greenwich Village and Dublin and the ‘Keens Chop House’. The ‘NoHo Star’ bar and restaurant were located in two adjacent buildings in Lafayette Street in NoHo (North of Houston Street), where Kiki Kogelnik had her studio, and closed down in December 2017. The element that defined the space in the bar was a large ceramic wall titled ‘Friday Night’, made by Kogelnik in 1989. Here she combined the chameleon with the most varied utensils symbolic of work, the equipment that is laid aside on Friday evening after a long week’s work, so as to leave humdrum daily existence behind one and to plunge into another world. This is why the chameleon was chosen, symbolising as it doesthe ability to adapt to every environment and to slip into other roles – like the visitors to the bar do, the moment they have stepped over the
threshold into the pub. In ‘Sleep’, created in 1991, the iguana-like creature is given added meaning: sleep, to which the title refers, probably also stands for death here, to which the animal’s skeletal form alludes as well. The watch hands in and outside of the picture symbolise time running out. Thus, Kiki Kogelnik enrichens the painting with the accompanying ceramics by a third dimension, and by bringing in the concept of time by a fourth one. In spring 2023, the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien showed a major solo presentation of this outstanding artist. The exhibition project is a collaboration
with the Kunstmuseum Brandts in Odense, Denmark and the Kunsthaus Zürich, where the show can be seen up until summer 2024, following its stopover in Vienna.