Kasper König, Legendary Curator, Dies at 80

Kasper König, the German curator, former museum director and co-founder of Skulptur Projekte Münster, has died at 80. He is survived by his wife, the photographer Heidi Specker, and two daughters and sons from previous relationships, who include art dealers Leo König and Johann König.

Widely credited with popularizing the large-scale exhibition format in Germany and abroad, König co-founded Skulptur Projekte in 1977 with Klaus Bußmann to inform the public about the history of modern sculpture. Speaking to frieze in 2017, König argued that the fact that the 100-day-long exhibition takes place only once every 10 years is what sets it apart from similar projects. ‘The distance makes it interesting,’ he said, arguing that change is difficult to recognize at the moment.

A self-described ‘museum-junkie’, König was director of Cologne’s Museum Ludwig from 2000 to 2012. As director, he oversaw 140 exhibitions and last year donated 50 works from his collection to the museum. In an email statement sent on Saturday, the current Ludwig director, Yilmaz Dziewior, praised König’s ‘knowledge, his judgment and his incorruptibility’, adding that he raised the museum to a ‘world standard’ during his tenure.

While König was best known for his contributions to the German-speaking art world, he also curated exhibitions internationally, most notably Manifesta 10 in 2014, which controversially took place in St Petersburg. Manifesta organizers deflected calls to cancel or postpone the exhibition after the Russian government annexed Crimea at the beginning of that year, with König telling Calvert Journal before the opening that he had a duty to the artists he invited and had to ‘work in the interest of the public, which might not want to be involved in all of these things which may be of no concern to them.’

The curator’s unfiltered way of speaking sometimes drew controversy and condemnation. In 2018, he was accused of making racist remarks by Cana Bilir-Meier, a German artist of Turkish descent, after he called German Turks ‘aggressive’ at a panel hosted by Münchner Kammerspiele as part of their ‘König Series’. The discussion, hosted by König, had intended to address the rise of the far right. On its Facebook page, the institution apologized and said that the panel had ‘missed [its] goal’.

König was well-known for sending postcards to friends, colleagues and acquaintances. After his death was announced, several individuals and institutions posted images of these correspondences to Instagram, including curator Chus Martinez. ‘We shared many spaces, professional and emotional ones,’ she wrote in the caption. ‘It was seldom that we agreed on something and quite a lot of times we had sounding disagreements. However, far from avoiding each other, we were sincerely happy when we met.’

Other posts celebrated König’s role as a mentor to younger generations of arts professionals. Mareike Dittmer, Assistant Director at the Adrian Piper Research Archive and former frieze d/e co-publisher, called him a ‘hero and an example’, while Trautwein Herleth – formally Galerie Barbara Weiss, a gallery founded and run by Konig’s third wife – spoke of his ‘unconditional support’ after Weiss’s death in 2019, and that he ‘helped us steer these most difficult times.’

^{Main image: Nicole Eiseman, Sketch for a Fountain (detail), 2017, Skulptur Projekte 2017, bronze, gips, wasserbecken. Courtesy: Skulptur Projekte Münster}