2024-08-13 03:11:50
The prominent German curator and art historian Kasper König died at the age of 80. The DPA agency reported this with reference to the family. The native of North Rhine-Westphalia first drew attention to himself in the late 1960s, when as a young man in Stockholm, Sweden, he prepared exhibitions of Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures and Andy Warhol’s works.
In Münster, Germany, in 1977 he initiated the Skulptur Projekt exhibition of modern sculpture, which has since been held once every ten years throughout the city and in public spaces. He started managing the Porticus gallery in Frankfurt.
Kasper König taught all his life, first in the 1970s in Halifax, Canada, later at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and finally at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he became a professor in 1988 and a year later rector.
When he left school in 2000, he was appointed director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne for the next 12 years, which has extensive collections of works by Pablo Picasso, German Expressionism and the Russian avant-garde.
In the same period, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was the curator of the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and selected contemporary art at Expo 2000.
In 2014, König became the curator of the closely watched Manifesta traveling art show, which was then held in St. Petersburg shortly after the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian Crimea.
Kasper König preparing the Manifesto in 2014. | Photo: Manifesta archive
In protest against the fact that the event was hosted by the Hermitage, funded by the Russian state, and that at that time a law banning the so-called promotion of homosexuality was newly in force in the country, for example the artist group What to Do or Ukrainian-born Oleg Kulik decided to boycott the official program.
König took such decisions hard. He argued that the West must not allow Russia to find itself in isolation, which will further deepen mutual misunderstandings.
“We exhibit a lot of artists who are unknown in Russia, we show more than anyone else. A boycott would only lead to further isolation,” Hospodářské noviny quoted him at the time.
In the course of his career, Kasper König also came into contact with Czech art several times. For example, in the 1980s he discovered the painter Jan Knap, whom he helped establish in Germany, in the following decade again in Hamburg, and later in Vienna with another well-known curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, they prepared the show Rozbité szperko, where alongside the works of Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz and Sigmar Polke was included in the paintings of Antonín Střížek.
“Few curators have had such an impact on contemporary art in Germany and on an international scale,” laments König’s death, Hermann Parzinger, outgoing head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. “Kasper König was one of the greats of the art world. With his knowledge, judgment and incorruptibility, he helped raise our museum to the world level,” condoled the spokeswoman of the Ludwig Museum on Saturday.