Kiki Kogelnig Fountain

I would like to tell you about a particular artwork: the Kiki Kogelnig Fountain, located south of the Landhaus. It was designed by an artist of great international importance, the city’s only representative of Pop Art. Kiki Kogelnig grew up in Bleiburg, attended secondary school in Klagenfurt, studied in Vienna and then moved first to Paris and later to the United States. In New York, she lived and worked alongside the most important artists of the time. The theme of the fountain revolves around water and song. Its title is “The Song”. Twelve bronze masks, arranged like the voices of a choir, release water while seeming to sing. They represent the musical and cultural sensitivity of the inhabitants, their love of poetry, their imagination. At the same time, they evoke the connection with Lake Wörthersee, with the mild climate of southern Carinthia and with the region’s proximity to Italy. The masks recall faces and human types that belong to an archaic world, shared across our cultural region. The artist, however, never saw her work completed: she died at the beginning of 1997. The fountain was inaugurated that same year, posthumously. Today it is a much-loved place: it conveys energy, vitality, and fits perfectly into this central space, between political life and cultural life, not far from the city theatre, where music and song continue to flourish, including several famous opera singers originally from Klagenfurt.

Between the Kiki Kogelnig Fountain and the town hall stretches Wiesbadener Straße. The name derives from the city of Wiesbaden, which helped Klagenfurt in the 1920s. The two cities thus became twinned. In the regional museum there is a gift dating from 1930 by the then mayor of Wiesbaden: it is a tall lectern, with an opening marble top panel, on which a dedication is engraved with the good wishes of the city of Wiesbaden to Klagenfurt.