König was born in Cologne, then West Germany. When his father, Kasper König, became director of Städelschule, the family moved to Frankfurt. Since a childhood accident at the age of eleven, König is partially blind. From the age of twelve on, he visited a boarding school in Marburg. In his youth König was mainly influenced by artists his father worked with, such as Dan Graham, On Kawara, M.C. Escher, Richard Artschwager, Joseph Beuys, and Jörg Immendorff. In 2002, König hadn't finished school yet, he founded his gallery in Berlin, "König Galerie". To get started, his uncle provided him a seed capital of €20,000, according to other sources €15,000. König's mother, Edda Köchl, was an actress. His father, Kasper König, is an art professor, curator, and former director of Museum Ludwig. Walther König, his paternal uncle, is an art book publisher. His older brother Leo Koenig also works as an art dealer.
Gallery
The gallery's focus is on museum exhibitions. In recent years, König was repeatedly listed in ArtReview's "Power 100" list. In 2011, he won FIAC's Prix Lafayette together with Helen Marten for the solo exhibition "Take a stick and make it sharp", on the grounds that it was considered to be "the best exhibition project presented by an emerging gallery". The gallery participates in international art fairs such as Art Basel, Frieze Art Fair, and Art Cologne. König describes the concept of his gallery as follows: "My strategy was always to have the best artists in their respective disciplines . Some galleries try to focus on a school. They have a group of certain movements, say, Leipzig painters. I always try to have the most relevant representative from each field, so to speak." Elsewhere he said: "I really try to avoid having a school." The gallery owns about 800 works of art.
Locations
The gallery was initially located at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, then moved to Dessauer Straße near Martin-Gropius-Bau and Neue Nationalgalerie in 2006, and took up a second location at St Agnes in Kreuzberg in May 2015. The latter is a former Catholic church complex that was built in the 1960s by the German architect and city planner Werner Düttmann and is considered to be a prime example of Brutalism. It provides an exhibition space of 800 square metres. In 2012, König signed a long-term lease for the complex, and it was converted by the German architect Arno Brandlhuber into an exhibition space for his gallery. The building also accommodates other tenants, among these the German culture magazine 032c and New York University Berlin’s art studio. In 2016, König reopened his original Dessauer Straße location for Gallery Weekend Berlin. Since the gallery moved into St Agnes, the space at Dessauer Straße is also the studio of Jeppe Hein.
