An infinite conversation: Hans Ulrich Obrist's personal memoir of Kasper König, curator, publisher, teacher, museum director, and friend to artists

A one-man curator school: Kasper König at the opening of the 2017 Münster Sculpture Project in Münster, northwest Germany Photo: Bernd Thissen/dpa/Alamy Live News
With the death of Kasper König the world loses one of the most important curators of the second half of the 20th century. There are so many dimensions to König’s practice that it almost resembles superstring theory. He was a curator, an Ausstellungsmacher (an exhibition maker), a publisher, a professor and educator, the dean of an art school and the builder of several new institutions, a museum director, a friend of the artist (or as On Kawara once told me he was an accomplice of the artist) and also an artist whose art form was sending and sharing an endless flow of postcards and postcard collages.
Kasper König was born in Mettingen, northwest Germany, in 1943, the year of the battle of Stalingrad and the Casablanca Conference. In his early 20s he left his native Germany with a first stop in London where he was at the right place at the right time and worked for the legendary Robert Fraser Gallery where Richard Hamilton and the early Pop artists were shown.
Soon König became a courier of the Fraser gallery to New York City, where he had jobs in galleries and with Richard Bellamy scouted artists for Jean Leering, then director of the Van Abbemuseum, in Eindhoven. In order to get his green card he found employment as the US representative of the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, where, as his mentor Pontus Hultén once explained to me, he had hired Kasper to form a transatlantic bridge between New York and the museum. Invited by Hultén, König curated a landmark show of Claes Oldenburg in 1966 at the Moderna Museet, and then in 1968 a celebrated exhibition of Andy Warhol’s work.
In 1969 König took his first directorship when, with his friend Isy Fiszman, he ran the experimental space A379089, in Antwerp. Parallel to his exhibition and curating activities Kasper founded, with his older brother Walther, the publishing house Verlag Gebrüder König in Cologne with a branch in New York. Artists have been making books for centuries—witness William Blake’s innovative self-illustrated books—but the artist’s book has become an important aspect of contemporary art in the 1960s, when a number of artists began to use the book not as a complementary, explanatory sidekick to their "real" work, but as a primary medium in and of itself. Books also played an important role at König’s next step, teaching in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and editing the Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design where he edited a remarkable series of books in the 1970s.
Benjamin Buchloh took over the Nova Scotia post in 1977, when König went independent again and returned to Germany, organising large-scale museum tours de force in the 1980s. One of these, the 1981 Westkunst exhibition in Cologne co-curated with the art critic Laszlo Glozer, was an initiation to art for an entire generation. As König once told me, he aimed with Westkunst at "Die Zurückführung der zeitgenössischen Kunst auf ihre Ursprünge" ("Tracing contemporary art to its origins"). Westkunst led to König’s appointment to a new professorship for art and the public at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and to another large scale exhibition Von hier aus (Up from here – Two months of new German art ) in 1984 in the Düsseldorf Messe where, alongside important pioneers, König gave a first international platform to young artists such as Katharina Fritsch and Thomas Schütte.
From 1977 onwards König pioneered the concept of public art, erecting, with his co-curator Klaus Bussman, a series of installations and artworks around the city of Munster, in northwest Germany launching the Skulptur Projekte Münster, which has become one of the most influential public art exhibitions. As the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster told me in an email from earlier this week the Skulptur Projekte Münster cycle was the revolutionary idea of an exhibition/ritual taking place every ten years.
"From then on I felt I was living in Kasper’s time," Gonzalez-Foerster said, "all the years ending in 7: 1987, 1997, 2007, 2017 and soon 2027; and a crazy dream came true when he invited me to take part in 2007."
Public art was how I first met König, at the Romerbrucke Heizkraftwerk power plant in Saarbrücken. In 1990 I had come to the city, in the west of Germany, near the border with France, on an errand for my friends Peter Fischli and David Weiss. In this case, the job was a droll one. The power plant was host to a project where contemporary artists were invited to create installations. Fischli and Weiss’s idea was to create a snowman, which they would install in a glass refrigerator, powered by the excess from the power station; as long as it generated electricity, there would be a friendly, unmelting snowman on display. The work expressed the plant’s function in a charming way. And so I had driven my parents' creaking Volvo to Saarbrücken with a snowman in the back—to be precise, it was a snowman dummy, a kind of test mannequin for Fischli and Weiss’s piece. I was to deliver it to the curatorial staff. The man waiting for me and the snowman, it turned out, was Kasper König, whom I had met before with the artists Gerhard Richter and Katharina Fritsch, but it was there in Saarbrücken that I had a chance to speak to him at length for the first time.
After our meeting in Saarbrücken, König asked me whether I would collaborate with him on an anthology, to be called The Public View. The idea was to create a sort of yearbook in which artists and writers would be asked to create works that somehow dealt with the theme implied by the title. I began to travel every week to work with him on the book in Frankfurt, where he was the head of the Städelschule, an important art school. I started attending lectures there whenever I was in Frankfurt, and König created a space next door called Portikus. It was little more than a container, but he made magic in it, inviting different artists to reinterpret the surroundings in their own way.
A learning experience: Hans Ulrich Obrist (left) and Kasper König Courtesy: Hans UIrich Obrist
Most of König's exhibitions arose from conversations with the artists, and a vital lesson he taught me was that it is not the job of a curator to impose their own signature but to be a mediator between artist and public. Our book was really a kind of group exhibition and debate in the medium of print. During the process of making The Public View, König and I were struck by the difficult status of painting and so we began to conceptualise an exhibition of painters together. I started to visit Frankfurt with greater frequency, as we began organising an exhibition for the Vienna Festival that came to be called Der zerbrochene Spiegel ("The Broken Mirror").
For the first time, I was curating a large show for a major institution. The exhibition space covered thousands of square metres, which raised the question of critical mass and how best to use such an enormous quantity of space. König and I wanted to undertake a survey of painting at a time when not many curators would exhibit paintings, and also to offer small retrospectives of work by some pioneering artists who had not yet received the exposure they deserved—such as Maria Lassnig, Dick Bengtsson or Raoul de Keyser. In keeping with the historical survey method, our catalogue listed the artists in chronological order of their dates of birth. It was a key experience for me to work on such a big exhibition for the first time.
The Broken Mirror attempted to group together a wide array of painters without dictating a structure or thesis for how they should relate to one another. The exhibition was not to be a stage for an essay-like argument we were making about painting, but a discontinuous assemblage of possibilities—we invited the widest range of painters we could, eventually ending up with three thousand paintings by forty-three painters. One of them was particularly surprising: the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (born 1919), with whom I began a long series of conversations. Displayed in The Broken Mirror among many much younger artists, Lassnig’s work seemed to have a remarkably radiant power. Her paintings became a kind of show-within-a-show.
It was an amazing learning experience for me and I later realised that this was integral part of König's methodology to involve young collaborators in his project and teach them the rules of the game, and also how to break the rules of the game, and invent new rules of the game of making exhibitions. König was a one-man curator school a long time before curator schools existed. But he was also the leading cultural impresario of his generation who mediated between art and politics and society, between artist, curator and the public.
As an independent curator König carried museums inside his head and yet, as brilliant director of Cologne’s Ludwig Museum, he was from 2000 onwards able to work within the constraints of an institution and open wide its potential. He used the past as a toolbox to construct the future and a dialogue between the generations. Throughout König's long career, which continued after Cologne with independent projects internationally, the direct dialogue and exchange with artists was always central, was always there and never stopped—it was an infinite conversation.

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