Kasper König, Exhibition Maker Who Guided Up to date Artwork, Dies at 80


Kasper König, whose trailblazing work as a curator, museum director, and educator has had a profound affect on the course of latest artwork for greater than half a century, died at 80. His dying was introduced on Saturday by Skulptur Projekte Münster, the sculpture-oriented exhibition that he based.

König was a type of exceptional figures—uncommon in any subject—who was capable of hold alighting in new locations, with vital new initiatives, decade after decade.

Within the Sixties, whereas in his 20s, he organized exhibitions with Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol on the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1977, with Klaus Bussmann, he established the Skulptur Projekte Münster, a showcase for formidable public artworks that happens in that German metropolis as soon as a decade. In 1987, he established Portikus, a revered kunsthalle at Frankurt’s Städelschule, the place he quickly after grew to become rector. And from 2000 to 2012, he was director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, deepening its fame as a number one venue for venturesome artwork.

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A man in a suit standing before an abstract sculpture with outstretched arms.

The Skulptur Projekte alone would have been sufficient to safe König a spot in historical past. Established in response to a public backlash over a kinetic sculpture by George Rickey that Münster had acquired, it has tapped lots of the period’s main artists to create works all through the town. König has organized each version alongside varied collaborators, and a few of the ensuing items have come to outline the careers of members.

Oldenburg put in three hulking concrete billiards balls close to a lake in 1977, Siah Armajani a pretty sequence of benches and a desk in a backyard at Münster College in 1987, and Nicole Eisenman a joyously irreverent fountain in a sylvan park in 2017. That very same 12 months, Pierre Huyghe reworked a disused ice-skating heart into an otherworldly sci-fi atmosphere by digging up its ground and including openings to its roof. About three dozen of the initiatives stay on everlasting show at present.

Whereas loads of star curators make their title by specializing in a selected group of artists, or a single kind of artwork, König had catholic tastes, and at all times appeared to be on the hunt for brand new individuals so as to add to the roster that he championed. “One of many mysteries of Kasper, for which I’ve the best respect, is that he’s completely, completely dedicated to an artist, as soon as he thinks that the artist is essential,” the artwork historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh advised ARTnews for a 2017 profile of König.

Rudolf König was born in 1943 in Mettingen, Germany, about 40 miles north of Münster, and took the title Kasper someday within the early Sixties. Intrigued by modern artwork, he interned with the seller Rudolf Zwirner (the daddy of David Zwirner), an important supply for Pop artwork and different fast-emerging currents in Cologne. He then ventured to London, the place he took courses on the Courtauld Institute of Artwork (he didn’t earn a level) and labored for the seller Robert Fraser.

By the mid-Sixties, König was in New York, although tales differ in regards to the technique of his arrival. One has him leaping ship in the summertime of 1965 whereas doing a stint within the service provider marine. One other has him delivering two Francis Picabia work to the town for Fraser on the finish of 1964 after which opting to remain. In any case, he hit the bottom operating in his new base of operations. His hopes to work for seller Dick Bellamy, who operated the Inexperienced Gallery, had been dashed as a result of the enterprise had simply closed, however he studied on the New College, assisted Oldenburg (so as to acquire a inexperienced card, he stated), and have become the New York rep for Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.

The model of occasions that includes the work of Picabia has particular poignancy since König’s zest for invention, irreverence, and free-thinking in his apply might recall the spirit of that Dadaist. König would ultimately change into a frontrunner of key establishments, the Städelschule and Ludwig, however a few of his early endeavors included working a short-lived experimental artwork area in Antwerp, Belgium that ended with what he termed a “palace coup” by the artist Panamarenko (who commandeered it as his studio) and beginning a vanguard press on the Nova Scotia School of Artwork and Design, a proving floor for conceptual artwork on the time. And at the same time as e-mail grew to become the usual technique of communication in all places, he was notorious for corresponding by postcard.

König’s life charted the expansion of grand worldwide artwork exhibitions that aimed to outline the zeitgeist and draw vacationers to far-flung locales. He suggested Harald Szeemann on the legendary Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, in 1972, steered Skulptur Projekte Münster (the subsequent iteration is scheduled for 2027), and arranged hulking reveals like “Westkunst,” a landmark 1981 effort with the artwork critic Laszlo Glozer at a Cologne commerce corridor that sought to inform the story of European and American artwork since 1939 by some 800 items by 200 artists. König’s listing of curatorial credit additionally contains the tenth outing of Manifesta, the roving European biennial, in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2014.

König’s survivors embrace a brother, Walther König, who’s an esteemed writer and vendor of artwork books in Cologne; his son Leo Köenig, an artwork seller primarily based in New York; and Johann König, a seller with branches in Berlin, Vienna, London, and Seoul. His third spouse, the Berlin gallerist Barbara Weiss, died in 2016.

Requested about his method to curating, König was keen on quoting the Fluxus-affiliated artist Robert Filliou’s quip that artwork is simply too vital to be handled with significance. He was an exemplar of the curator as catalyst, and his exhibitions evince a deep and abiding religion in artists, an everlasting desireto allow them to strive issues out and to play. “I don’t like artwork with a capital A, when it turns into form of pompous,” he as soon as stated.

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