Fritz Koenig

Fritz Koenig (20 June 1924 – 22 February 2017) was a German sculptor best known outside his native country for The Sphere, which once stood in the plaza beneath the two World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan.[1] With its damage deliberately left unrepaired, the sculpture now stands in Manhattan's Liberty Park as a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks. His oeuvre includes other works, including other memorials.

Fritz Koenig
Fritz Koenig in 2015
Born(1924-06-20)20 June 1924
Würzburg, Germany
Died22 February 2017(2017-02-22) (aged 92)
Landshut, Germany
NationalityGerman
EducationKunstakademie München
Known forThe Sphere

Biography

Born in Würzburg, Koenig's family moved to the Bavarian community of Landshut in 1930, when he was six years old. He entered the Oberrealschule (today the Hans-Leinberger-Gymnasium) in 1942,[2][3] and in the same year, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front, where he was captured and taken as a prisoner of war. In the years after World War II, he studied art at the Kunstakademie München (Munich School of Art), starting in 1946 and graduating in 1952. Nine years later, he moved to Ganslberg, a farming community outside Landshut where he lived and worked on a horse farm. In 1964, he was appointed professor of art at the Technical University of Munich.[4] He died in Landshut on 22 February 2017, aged 92.

Work
The Sphere was temporarily installed in New York City's Battery Park after 9/11.

Koenig's body of work largely consists of figures or shapes assembled from simple geometric forms cast in metal. His representions of human form are heavily stylized, with heads made of spheres and bodies and limbs of cylinders. His Holocaust memorial design exemplifies this, adding bones poured on a mound.

Major works
  • The Sphere, 1969–71, now displayed in Liberty Park in New York City.
  • German memorial at Mauthausen concentration camp, 1983
  • Memorial to victims of the Munich massacre during the 1972 Summer Olympics.
  • Permanent exhibits at the Hofberg Sculpture Museum in Landshut.

References
  1. Shapiro, Julie. "9/11 Sphere to Be Evicted from Battery Park". DNAinfo. Archived from the original on 7 April 2012. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
  2. https://www.h-l-g.de/index.php/unser-gymnasium/schulhaus
  3. [Annual School Report, 1941/1942]
  4. https://portal.mytum.de/pressestelle/pressemitteilungen/news-674
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