Mythos & Moderne

With Mythos & Moderne, the Glyptothek is celebrating the great Lower Bavarian sculptor and draughtsman Fritz Koenig (1924-2017) on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

In collaboration with the KOENIGmuseum and the city of Landshut, the exhibition presents a selection of large and small-format sculptures, drawings and paper cuts from various phases of the artist's work from the late 1950s to the late 1990s. In their abstract-figurative formal language, the selected sculptures and groups of works are as committed to the principles of a pre-modern tradition as they are to classical modernism and reveal Koenig's intensive and multi-layered engagement with antiquity. Figures from ancient mythology (Poseidon, Icarus, Ianus and Rossmenschen) can be found alongside classical pictorial motifs (Biga and Quadriga) and architectural forms (Caryatids), which have repeatedly influenced the work of artists over the centuries and inspired them to create new pictorial formulations.

Born in Würzburg in 1924, Fritz Koenig was part of the first post-war class at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich in 1946. A scholarship from the Academy abroad enabled Koenig to study briefly in Paris in 1951, which awakened in him a lifelong fascination with African sculpture and a lasting admiration for its formal qualities. His approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was characterised above all by his stay as a scholarship holder at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1957. Fritz Koenig has maintained a close relationship with the Staatliche Antikensammlungen (State collections of antiquities) and the Glyptothek since 1979, when he was appointed a member of the board of trustees.

For the young modernist artist, who was striving for a formal renewal of European figurative sculpture after the catastrophic experience of the Second World War, it was no longer classical antiquity itself, the heritage of Greece and Rome, but an antiquity enriched by the non-classical heritage of Africa and Europe, which became a stimulating and fruitful source of inspiration for his own artistic work.

Last edited on 28.11.2024