Carlo König

Carlo König was born and raised in Basel, Switzerland. He trained as a bookbinder and later worked as a window dresser before embarking on a journey to Germany at the age of 16. He lived in various cities including Stuttgart, Munich, Karlsruhe, and Mannheim. Due to his German citizenship through his father, König narrowly escaped conscription during World War I. After returning to Basel, he contracted tuberculosis and later suffered from a severe and prolonged sleep disorder.

König was a self-taught painter who had contact with numerous artists in Basel. In the 1920s, he primarily painted realistic watercolors. During a stay in Davos in 1923, he visited Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Frauenkirch, which inspired him to create some woodcuts. König regularly participated in the Basel Christmas exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel from 1925 onwards. He studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1929 and, like other painters, frequently painted watercolors in Collioure in southern France. He also undertook several trips and study stays to Berlin, Italy, Dalmatia, Tunis, and London in the 1930s, funded by various smaller scholarships from the His Foundation. He later processed the sketches and studies from his travels into numerous woodcuts and a few etchings.

From 1932 onwards, König began creating collages, which he assembled into pointillistic images using colorful paper cutouts, mostly based on his own watercolor templates. The experimental collage works are seen as precursors to the mosaics he would later create. König was not a member of the Basel section of the Swiss Society of Painters, Sculptors and Architects (GSAMBA), but he was a co-founder of the Group 33. He had a close artistic and personal friendship with Rudolf Maeglin, but otherwise remained a loner throughout his life. Carlo König once said: "It is a strange observation that one has the least connection to the place where one lives."