BERLIN.- König Gallery recently expressed their sadness to learn of the passing of their dear friend, Karl Horst Hödicke (1938–2024).

"Since organizing his own exhibition space and presenting his work publicly for the first time in then-West Berlin in 1964, Hödicke carved his own unique path. Though he became internationally recognized for his pioneering work in expressionistic, heavy-gestured painting in the 1980s, there is an intimate, unpretentious quality to his art that many who knew him and his way of working would recognize. Hödicke was prolific, creating many thousands of paintings over the course of seven decades, a body of work that also includes works on paper, sculpture, and video, the latter of which he made mostly while living in New York.

Fiercely independent and singular in focus, Hödicke received an invitation to the prestigious Villa Massimo in 1968, absorbing the treasures of Rome alongside the work of his Arte Povera contemporaries. The manner of embedding himself like a wartime journalist in the fabric of a city followed Hödicke back to Berlin, where the divided metropolis stood as a daily reminder of the brutality, as well as the beauty, of his adopted home. Hödicke was more fond of working than discussing his work, his style as an interlocutor was as direct and uncompromising as his art.

What may have slipped by unnoticed is the humor and lightness in much of what Hödicke committed to paint, giving the same grandeur to his son Jonas’ toy battleship in the bathtub as an ancient ruin or a symbol of the nascent Federal Republic. One need only riffle through Hödicke’s subjects to find the stoicism of the Brandenburg Gate juxtaposed with the whimsy of the “Small Pictures from Kitchen and Bathroom”, to understand that the act of producing a work meant treating everything with a kind of radical equivalence, each subject as noble (or profane) as the next one.

Hödicke’s studio was situated in the same street as one of the former exhibition spaces that Johann König occupied, their stories forever linked. Hödicke devoted the same concentration and commitment to the last exhibition we organized together, which closed just a few weeks before his passing. We feel eternally grateful to Karl Horst and his family for the unique opportunity we all cherished to work closely with one of the great monuments of postwar German art.
You will forever be missed."