photo: Heidi Specker

Kasper König

(21 November 1943 – 9 August 2024)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the loss of its long-standing member Kasper König.

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Kasper König was a restless driving force as an exhibition organiser, museum director and teacher. Since the 1960s, he initiated numerous international art projects, including major exhibitions such as ‘Westkunst’ (1981), ‘Von hier aus’ (1984), ‘In-Between Architecture’ (2000) and the ‘Manifesta 2014’ in St. Petersburg. Together with Klaus Bußmann, he launched the ‘Skulptur Projekte’ Münster back in 1977. König brought art into the public space and, as director of the Museum Ludwig, also took a stand against the exclusive character of museums when he said: ‘The museum is a public space. It belongs to everyone and no one.’

Kasper König cultivated countless contacts with artists; his projects were based on long and intensive working relationships. Driven by curiosity and enthusiasm, he always sought the friction inherent in a life with art and for art.

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Obituary taz
Obituary Frieze
Obituary FAZ

Ben Vautier

(18. July 1935 – 5. June 2024)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the loss of its member Ben Vautier.

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His white, handwritten language elements on a dark background are known worldwide. Vautier was a collector of words, but also of images, everyday objects and thoughts. He juxtaposed them or provocatively interwove them in ever new contexts. With compilation and doubt, through his constant actions, Vautier ultimately worked on the concept of art again and again. His papeterie in Nice served him as a place of experimentation; today it is kept as a museum installation in the Centre Pompidou. Vautier was already a member of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and was one of its key players. It is therefore hardly surprising that he took part in documenta V in 1972, organised by Harald Szeemann, where he appeared as a performer and living sculpture.

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Obituary Neuer Zürcher Zeitung
Obituary Tagesspiegel
photo: Nanaé Suzuki

Rolf Langebartels

(16 May 1941 – 16 January 2024)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the loss of its member Rolf Langebartels.

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Rolf Langebartels initially studied mechanical engineering and gained a doctorate in cybernetics before turning to art in 1977. His experimental works include photography, kinetic sculptures, sound sculptures and installations. Rolf Langebartels founded the non-profit gallery Giannozzo in 1978 and later the art association of the same name. In the 1980s and 1990s, this was a key venue for sound art in Berlin. Rolf Langebartels curated and facilitated numerous projects here and published books, artist books, audio cassettes and records in the Edition Giannozzo series. He has also published his own theoretical texts on sound art and has taken part in many international sound art and performance festivals.

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Kazuo Katase

(1947 – 9. January 2024)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the loss of its member Kazuo Katase.

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Born in Shizuoka, Japan, Kazuo Katase came to Germany as a young artist in 1976 and has remained here ever since. His work encompasses painting, photography, spatial installation, video and stage design. Rooted in Japanese culture, he has combined moments of Zen Buddhism with European traditions in a variety of ways. In addition to works in public spaces, his exhibitions in museums, in which he worked directly with museum spaces and collections, are particularly noteworthy. He had a long-standing and particularly close collaboration with the Museum Wiesbaden. As early as 1986, Katase was involved in Jan Hoet’s exhibition ‘Chambres d’amis’ in Ghent, and in 1992 he took part in documenta IX.

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Obituary documenta archiv
Obituary Freunde des Museums Wiesbaden
photo: Jens Brand

Phill Niblock

(2 October 1933 – 8 January 2024)

We mourn the loss of our long-standing member Phill Niblock, born Oct. 2nd 1933 in Anderson Indiana, USA – died Jan. 8th 2024 in New York City, NY, USA.

Obituary taz
Obituary artNews
photo: Axel M. Mosler

Manfred Schmalriede

(18 February 1937 – 24 October 2023)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the loss of its member Manfred Schmalriede.

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Manfred Schmalriede worked on many levels with a searching agility of vision and thought. He was an artist and theorist; the production and reception of images occupied him in equal measure. Early on, he focussed on photography and explored the medium in a wide range of ways. He was not only interested in artistic photography, but also in the use of photography in everyday life. Manfred Schmalriede was an author, exhibition curator and, above all, a teacher. As a university lecturer in design theory, semiotics and aesthetics in Pforzheim from 1971 to 2002, he influenced generations of students. Here he was known for constantly redeveloping his thinking in speech and thus creating temporary, constantly changing networks of thought.

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Bettina Brach

(9 April 1966 – 30 July 2023)

Obituary Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst

photo: Veronike Hinsberg

Inge Mahn

(20 November 1943 – 19 June 2023)

Obituary Monopol-Magazin
Obituary Kunstforum

Tibor Gáyor (14.April 1929 – 18. Juni 2023)

Tibor Gáyor

(14 April 1929 – 18 June 2023)

Peter Weibel​

(5 March 1944 – 1 March 2023)

Obituary Frankfurter Allgemeine

Imre Bak

(5 July 1939 – 23 December 2022)

Obituary Institut für aktuelle Kunst im Saarland

phto: Gereon Inger

Dr. Dorothée Bauerle-Willert

(9. July 1951 – 15. November 2022)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the death of Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, our President and long-time Executive Director. She passed away on November 15th, 2022, in Montegrotto, Italy, at the age of 71.

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Dorothée Bauerle-Willert studied Art History and Literatures. She wrote her doctoral thesis on Aby Warburg’s pictorial atlas ‘Mnemosyne’. In the 1980s, her many professional activities included an assistance at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the direction of the Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst in Bremen, and her engagement as deputy director of the Ulm Museum. From 1990 to 2007, she was living abroad, and held visiting professorships in Asunción/Paraguay, Montevideo/Uruguay, Tallinn/Estonia, and in Belgrade/Serbia. From 2009 to 2019, Dorothée Bauerle-Willert was production dramaturge at the Vorarlberger Landestheater in Bregenz. Her return to Berlin in 2007 was followed by teaching positions at numerous universities: at the HfBK Dresden University of Fine Arts, the University of Cologne, and the University of Art and Design Burg Giebichenstein Halle. Dorothée Bauerle-Willert actively promoted cultural policy issues in the German Culture Council and its expert committees. Her great contributions to discussions in the German Arts Council, as well as in the Board of Trustees of the Stiftung KunstFonds, were also extremely valued. We who had the privilege to know her, cherished Dorothée’s sensitive and passionate character. We admired her gifts as an exceptional speaker, brilliant author, and dedicated teacher. Dorothée Bauerle-Willert was a true cosmopolitan, and during her presidency and as a long-time executive director of the IKG, she enthusiastically advocated tolerance and understanding across borders. Her commitment was entirely for the freedom of art. We will grievously miss Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, deeply grateful for all that she generously shared with us. We will always remember her for what she was like: a nonpareil personality, open at heart and in spirit, full of life, enthusiastic, inspiring, and driven by a seemingly inexhaustible energy.

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photo: SpreeTom

Jürgen Schweinebraden

(15 March 1938 – 15 September 2022)

Obituary Deutsche Welle

Dietrich Helms​

(13. March 1933 – 10. August 2022)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the death of its founding member Dietrich Helms.

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Dietrich Helms, born in Osnabrück in 1933, developed a multifaceted oeuvre over decades, always asking himself new questions, arriving at radical solutions in the visual. His art, as a sensual becoming, as a sentient thinking, opened new openings again and again. After studying art in Hamburg and Kassel and German and literature at the University of Hamburg, he first worked as a teacher, and from 1965 to 1998 he held a professorship at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.  He served as IKG-President from 1978 till 1981. Early on, he broke away from traditional notions of the image and found his way to the concept of the image as a structural field. The spectrum of his works ranges from drawings to material objects, from word evaluations to installations and paintings. The material of his art was of co-determining effect, haptic experience and visual he let play sovereignly into each other and also the incidental coincidence was included in all conceptuality. Dietrich Helms was not only a wonderful artist, but also an instigator of artistic activity, a mediator, a critic, researcher, and a generous, devoted human being. We will all miss him very much.

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Josef Ramaseder​

(12. February 1956 – 23. March 2022)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the death of Josef Ramaseder, who passed away on March 23, 2022.

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Josef was a long-time, always committed, sometimes enraging IKG member and also served on the board for several years. In 2016 he hosted a wonderful annual meeting in his hometown Linz. Josef Ramaseder, born in 1956, studied at the University of Applied Arts with Oswald Oberhuber from 1979 to 1983 and medicine at the University of Vienna from 1974 to 1980. In his life and in his work he always opened up new horizons of experience.  Very different fields became the fundus of his expanded artistic work, which could range from painting to video, photography, installations, art in public space, curatorial projects, and cooperative projects with other artists. At the center, however, remained the complex medium of painting.  In recent years he created paintings that grow like mushrooms, painterly experiments with fungal spores that allowed nature and art, chance and transience to interact on the canvas. Now he has gone himself. We will miss Josef very much.

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Nikolaus Lang

(12. February 1941 – 11. February 2022)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the death of Nikolaus Lang.

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Nikolaus Lang was born in Oberammergau in 1941 died on February 11 2022 in Murnau. He first learned to carve at the local woodcarving school, later he studied at the Munich Art Academy. Nikolaus Lang was a modest artist.  He never makes much fuss about himself or his two-time participation in Documenta.  As an archaeologist of everyday life, he was far too busy for that: It became his life’s work to document becoming and passing, creating and destroying in a exemplaric manner.  The trace-securing artist arranged relics, survivors, and found objects and related them to one another, playing with their form, color, and texture, thereby giving them a new quality that could be experienced by the senses.<br><br> “The artist can only make visible what already exists in nature”, this sentence was Lang’s credo.

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László Beke

(23 May 1944 – 31 January 2022)

The IKG mourns the death of its member László Beke.

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Beke, born in 1944 passed away on January 31, 2022 in Budapest. He was an art historian, curator and an immensely important and stimulating figure for the Hungarian art scene since the 1960s. He actively contributed to the development of the neo-avant-garde and conceptual art in Hungary, and his scientific focus was the theory of photography. Beke studied art history at the University of Budapest. Beke taught in Lyon and was chief curator of the 19th and 20th century collections of the Hungarian National Gallery, general director of the Műcsarnok/Art Hall in Budapest. From 2000-2012 Beke was director of the Research Institute of Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and professor at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.
We mourn the loss of our member.

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Hartmut Böhm

(19 April 1938 – 26 December 2021)

It is with great sadness that we have to say goodbye to our long-time member Hartmut Böhm.

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He passed away in Berlin on December 26, 2021 at the age of 83. Born in 1938 in Kassel, he studied from 1958 to 1962 at the art academy there with Arnold Bode and soon became one of the most distinguished representatives of concrete-constructivist art. Hartmut Böhm’s structuring of chaotic reality in and through the work of art was always about this world of sensual manifoldness and its transference into a structure that recognizes that what is sensual is not the immediacy of a feeling or impression, nothing given or recognized, but the moment of a compelling encounter and its formation. We gratefully remember many IKG journeys together, always Hartmut was an enriching guest at our meetings. With incisive and insightful contributions, both visual and verbal, he inspired many of our members. Hartmut could let the casual be casual and at the same time had an incredible sense of aesthetic balance and its imponderability. We will miss Hartmut.

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Obituary art-in-berlin

Lawrence Weiner

(10 February 1942 – 2 December 2021)

The IKG mourns the loss of its member Lawrence Weiner, who was born in 1942 in the Bronx borough of New York and died there on 2 December 2021.

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Lawrence Weiner became an artist one morning when he decided to go to his studio instead of going to work after school. Weiner began to paint, but it was also and above all language that was to become his medium and which he added to the traditional media – stone, wood, metal, clay – as a sculptor. As one of the founders of conceptual art, he was never interested in simply “setting up a new department” in art history, precisely because art was a social concern for him.
At the opening of his last major exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz “WHEREWITHAL | WAS ES BRAUCHT” in autumn 2016, he said that he was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain his optimism. Even though it is so important: Why? “Because of the younger people. Give them a chance”. We look further, without them: “As Far as the Eye Can See.”

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Christian Boltanski

(6 September 1944 – 14 July 2021)

It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to our long-time member Christian Boltanski.

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Born in Paris in 1944, he wanted to leave a trace of his life through his work, distilled from all the experiences and things that occupied him, that surrounded him. In his work he dealt with childhood and death, memory and forgetting, enchantment and horror, chaos of life and the attempt of an archival order of this chaos. Especially in his last large installations and spaces, death was always present; now Boltanski himself has gone. We are deeply saddened.

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Obituary Monopol-Magazin
Obituary Süddeutschen Zeitung

Ad Petersen

(8 February 1931 – 26 June 2021)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the death of its long-time member Ad Petersen.

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Ad Petersen, born in 1931 in Saandam, the Netherlands, was conservator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from 1960 to 1990 after his studies. There he curated numerous exhibitions with artists of his generation. Since 1990 he worked as a freelance curator. Fascination and passion for art were what drove Petersen as a museum man and as a photographer. With his camera, he documented the artists with whom he worked intensively during his many years of activity. The result were extraordinary series of images, sensitive portraits that captured the perfect moment in each case and testify to the unobtrusive familiarity between the photographer and the artists and, at the same time, to the joy of art.

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Obituary Stedelijk Museum

Richard Nonas

(1936 – 11 May 2021)

Richard Nonas had actually studied literature and ethnology.

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In the 1960s, he did ethnological fieldwork among the indigenous people in Northern Ontario and Yukon, followed by years of research in Mexico. Instead of writing essays and books about it, he later found in sculpture the tool to give form to observations and sensations A central role in his work was played by dealing with material. For him, building sculptures meant thinking about the movement of material, about weight, mass and the resistance that the material offered to movement. Richard Nonas died while preparing a monograph on his work. The International Artists’ Committee mourns the loss of its long-standing member.

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Gerhard Mantz

(22 January 1950 – 30 March 2021)

The International Artists Forum IKG mourns the loss of its long-time member Gerhard Mantz.

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His sudden death is a loss for all of us as it is for the art. Gerhard opened up new categories of play and thought for art, and in his work he repeatedly stretched the boundaries of what is possible confidently dancing across boundaries between media and disciplines – into the seemingly impossible. And he was not afraid of beauty, nor of the terrible, which sometimes underlay his new images, transforming opposites into shimmering ambivalence. We are deeply saddened.

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Obituary kunstforum

Elisabeth Jappe

(1934 – 22 January 2021)

We mourn the passing of our long-time member and former secretary Elisabeth Jappe, who died on January 22, 2021.

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Elisabeth Jappe, born in 1936, was a gifted curator and art scholar who, in addition to her comments on art politics and actions, supported important developments in the context of installation and performance. In 1981 she founded the Moltkerei Werkstatt in Cologne, an important platform for performance and sound art, a place for the art of the ephemeral and a laboratory for amalgam Fluxus. In 1987, she curated the exhibition Expanded Performance and ensured that theater and performance were given a prominent place for the first time in the history of documenta. We are deeply saddened.

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Obituary Kunstforum