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 between the two World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan but which now stands, its damage deliberately left unrepaired, in Manhattan’s Liberty Park as a memorial to the victims of the 11 September 2001 attacks. His oeuvre includes other works, including other memorials.Born in Würzburg, Koenig’s family moved to the Bavarian community of Landshut when he was six. In the years after World War II he studied art at the Kunstakademie München (Munich School of Art), 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. He died in Landshut on 22 February 2017, aged 92.oenig’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.
