Kasper König died on 9 August 2024 in Berlin. Born Rudolf Hans König on 21 November 1943 in Mettingen, Westphalia, he left behind an impressive legacy as a curator, exhibition organiser, university lecturer, rector and museum director.
Image above: Kasper König (left) with Claes Oldenburg at a press conference in June 2012 for the opening of the exhibition Claes Oldenburg – The Sixties at the Museum Ludwig
© Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
König began his career at a young age and organised an exhibition on Claes Oldenburg in Stockholm when he was only 23. He taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, among others. As a professor and later as rector of the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, he set decisive accents in the education of young art students and founded the renowned Kunsthalle Portikus.
König became particularly famous for the “Skulptur Projekte Münster”, which he launched in 1977 together with Klaus Bussmann. This decentralised art event, which always takes place at the same time as the documenta in Kassel, left its mark on the art scene worldwide. As Director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne from 2000 to 2012, he also championed the presentation of modern and contemporary art.
In 2012, Kasper König handed over his extensive private archive, consisting of around 40 shelf metres of documents, including important correspondence with artists such as Isa Genzken, Claes Oldenburg, Gerhard Richter and Thomas Schütte, to the Central Archive of the International Art Trade (ZADIK). This archive contains valuable project sketches and collections of material that provide insights into König’s artistic processes and his work as a curator. Two charity auctions were organised to mark his departure from the management of the Museum Ludwig, with the proceeds going to the museum’s art foundation. The auction of around 70 works by renowned artists, including Thomas Schütte, Andreas Gursky and Rosemarie Trockel, raised a total of over 2 million euros for the future of the museum.
Since 2016, König has moderated bi-monthly panel discussions at the Münchner Kammerspiele, where renowned artists and curators such as Thomas Bayrle and Okwui Enwezor have been guests. An incident at one of these talks in November 2018, in which the artist Cana Bilir-Meier felt belittled by König, sparked a debate about discrimination in the art world, which took up König’s behaviour as an example of the structural discrimination of minorities in the art scene.
Kasper König was married twice and is survived by two sons who are also active in the art world. König’s son Leo runs a gallery in New York, his son Johann is a gallery owner in Berlin. The art book dealer Walther König is Kasper König’s brother. Kasper König was married twice, in his second marriage to the Berlin gallery owner Barbara Weiss, who died in 2016.
