BERLIN.- Pace presents Exquisite Corpse, an exhibition curated by Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, raised in Woodland, California) in response to her appreciation of the influential Austro-American artist Kiki Kogelnik (b. 1935, Graz, Austria; d. 1997, Vienna, Austria).

In conversation with two of Hollowell’s contemporaries, Sascha Braunig (b. 1983, Qualicum Beach, Canada) and Veronika Pausova (b. 1987, Prague, Czech Republic), Hollowell discovered that Kogelnik’s work had equally impacted their own practices. This exhibition brings together works by all four cross-continental, multigenerational artists.

“Exquisite corpse” is a collaborative parlor game invented by Surrealist artists in 1925. Players take turns either writing words or drawing sections of a body on a folded sheet of paper, hiding their contributions so the next person can see and respond to only the very end of the previous work. Hollowell felt that this Surrealist concept was perfectly descriptive of how artists inspire and influence each other over time and distance.

The paintings, works on paper, and sculptures on view by the four artists in this exhibition exemplify each of their commitments to exploring the body, particularly the female body. Together, the artists form a lineage of bodily abstraction with a shared use of vibrant colors and deliberate mark making. Rather than representing the body as a stable subject, each artist approaches the figure as a site of tension, one that can be stretched, flattened, cut up, and transformed. The works shown wrestle with ideas of the body as a machine, a modular system, and a site shaped by technology, labor, and scientific developments.

As a result, feminism and the question of what it means to make a feminist image are central to this collection of works. Each artist reckons in her own way with the identity of “feminist”—from the earliest born, Kogelnik, who preferred not to be labeled as such, to the three contemporaries, who embrace the term and hold the investigation and depiction of gender and its complex cultural contexts to be central to their practices—all while working in yet another era of feminist backlash.





The visual similarities between these artists’ works are striking. Hollowell is most impacted by the way in which Kogelnik sought to blend the idea of the body and the machine, and how this composite informs a feminist critique. Pausova is influenced by the direct, unapologetic, and sometimes “violent” imagery and energy in Kogelnik’s playfully unrestrained compositional devices, encouraging the creation of “uncomfortable” works. Braunig began using the silhouette and cutouts in her practice only after discovering Kogelnik’s work, which in Braunig’s words “allowed” her to incorporate similar structures in her own paintings. Bold, emotional color connects the featured works, in which hard lines set against rendered forms and flat areas of color and pattern are created with a controlled brush stroke and, more often than not, a crisp and stylized finish. Seen as a whole, Hollowell envisions this exhibition as a playful game of exquisite corpse, in which an iconic female artist has folded the paper and passed it down to the next generation.

Sascha Braunig (b. 1983, Qualicum Beach, BC, Canada) devotes her critical focus to the capaciousness and limitations of the feminine form under duress. Braunig’s figures teeter towards overextension—waists are pinched to extremity; appendages are restricted or decked in barbs; phantom silhouettes sinuously negotiate and adapt to the contours of their technicolor environments. Drawing on feminist artistic discourse, Braunig’s imaginaries engage the ways that gender performance and systems of power are replicated. Training, fitting, and reinforcement are recurring motifs in the severe and sometimes sinister crucibles which Braunig’s figures endure. Cast in vibrant complementary palettes and anchored through Braunig’s graphic, tensile formal vocabulary, her images recapitulate and usurp foundational codes of gendered visuality to create surreal and unequivocally emblematic scenes.

Sascha Braunig lives and works between New York and Portland, Maine. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA in painting from Yale University. Braunig was awarded a residency from the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in 2016, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2016, the MacDowell Fellowship in 2013 and 2023. Selected solo exhibitions include François Ghebaly, New York and Los Angeles; Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada; Magenta Plains, New York; Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta; and MoMA PS1, New York. Her work has been featured in institutional exhibitions including the Quebec City Biennial; Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio; and the New Museum Triennial, New York.

Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, raised in Woodland, California) is recognized for her paintings that evoke bodily landscapes, using geometric shapes to move a figure or its actions into abstraction. Her work explores themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. An investigation of autobiography became evident in Hollowell’s early work, which explored the use of gradient staining techniques on cotton supports as a metaphor for intimate spaces—meditations on sleep and bodily fluids. These canvases evolved into figurative painting, introducing female nudes as subject matter as well as the use of reflection and mirroring. Her subsequent work exhibited a shift toward abstraction, characterized by radiating silhouettes and a pulsating color palette.

Hollowell has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Recalibrate, Long Museum, Shanghai (2021); Sacred Contract, König Galerie, Berlin (2021); Drawings as Urtext, The Anderson at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Richmond (2023); Dilation Stage, Pace Gallery, New York (2024); and Overview Effect, Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (2024–25). The artist’s first museum survey, Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years, was held at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 2024 and traveled to The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Recent group exhibitions include Put It This Way: (RE)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2022–23); Being in the World, Long Museum, Shanghai (2023); x PINK 101, X Museum, Beijing (2023); The Infinite Woman, Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles Island, Var, France (2024); and Beyond the Present: Collecting for the Future: The Christine Mack Art Collection, Southampton Arts Center, New York (2025).

Her work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including The Albertina Museum, Vienna; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands; He Art Museum, Shunde, China; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and M+, Hong Kong, among others.

Kiki Kogelnik (b. 1935, Graz, Austria; d. 1997, Vienna, Austria) lived and worked between New York and Austria during her lifetime. She is widely recognized for her striking compositions, flat graphic geometries, vibrant color palette, and depictions of the human form. Kogelnik studied at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna (1954) and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (1955–58). She moved to New York in 1962 and found a community alongside artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Important one-artist museum exhibitions include Kiki Kogelnik – Hangings, MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (1996); Kiki Kogelnik: I Have Seen the Future, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2012); Kiki Kogelnik: Fly Me to the Moon, Modern Art Oxford, United Kingdom (2015); Kiki Kogelnik: Inner Life, Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2017); Kiki Kogelnik – Les cyborgs ne sont pas respectueuses, Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (2020); Kiki Kogelnik: Now Is the Time, Kunstforum Wien, Vienna, which traveled to Kunstmuseum Brandts, Odense, Denmark, and Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland (2023–2024). She was the subject of major retrospectives at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna in 1998 and at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria in 2013. Kogelnik’s work is held in numerous collections worldwide including Kunsthalle Praha, Prague; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Pinault Collection, Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Kunsthaus Zürich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Albertina Museum, Vienna; mumok, Vienna among many others.

Veronika Pausova’s (b. 1987, Prague, Czech Republic) oil paintings are theatrical assemblages played out by a cast of unexpected characters: lacquered fruit flies and spiders, powdery moths, drooping flowers, disembodied toes, fingers, and ears. Funny and captivating, the unique actors populating her paintings are each rendered with exceptional skill and control, as she combines hyper-realistic precision with experimental paint applications like soaking the canvas with imbibed sponges and fabric. Pulling and leaping across the canvases, Pausova’s human and non-human entities are united by trajectories of their own making—hands grasping their own frame, gangly legs galloping away, a nipple held onto the canvas with but a thread—which together illustrate an ensnaring story unfolding before us. Imbued with humor and playfulness, Pausova’s painterly lexicon is both alluring and perplexing, and seemingly in perpetual metamorphosis across a cosmos of possible states, places, and times. Pausova ultimately creates graphic paintings that marry nonsense and narrative, offsetting her skill and precision with her sense of humor to create surreal compositions that are uniquely hers.

Veronika Pausova lives and works in Montreal, Canada. She received her BFA from Glasgow School of Art (2009) and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (2013). She has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at the Esker Foundation, Calgary; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; Public Gallery, London; The Sunday Painter, London; and Simone Subal, New York, among others. Notable group exhibitions include the Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada; Margot Samel, New York; Main Projects, Richmond, Virginia; Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei; Perrotin, Paris; Oakville Galleries, Andrehn Schiptjenko, Stockholm; and Bureau, New York. Pausova’s work is collected by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, among other private and public collections.