Kasper König, German curator, founder of Skulptur Projekte Münster and former director of Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, has died aged 80.
Born in Mettingen, König kicked off his career as a courier on behalf of Robert Fraser Gallery in 1965, delivering two Francis Picabia paintings to New York, where he then settled and worked with Andy Warhol in his Factory. Still in his twenties, he curated solo presentations of Claes Oldenburg (1966) and Andy Warhol (1968) at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, for which he served as a representative during his time in New York.
In 1977, König cofounded Skulptur Projekte Münster, the landmark public art exhibition in Münster that took place every ten years. In the 1980s, he organised seminal exhibition Westkunst in Cologne and cofounded Portikus in Frankfurt am Main. From 2000 to 2012, König directed Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, where he oversaw the institution’s renovation as well as the presentations of around 140 exhibitions during his tenure time.
‘If the description ‘curator’ no longer does him justice, “force of nature” might,’ ArtReview writes in his Power 100 profile in 2010, referring to him as a curator that left ‘fingerprints all over art’s recent history’.
