Biographical Information
Karola Kraus was born in 1961 in St. Georgen in Schwarzwald. In the 1970s, her parents, Anna and Dieter Grässlin, began to collect works from the German Informel movement. At the beginning of the 1980s, Karola Grässlin met Martin Kippenberger, who had a strong influence on her decision to take up a profession in contemporary art. Grässlin completed her studies of Art History with an MA thesis that compared the early works of Wols to Surrealism. During her time as project assistant for the major exhibition “Metropolis“ in the Gropius-Bau in Berlin, she assisted twenty-five international artists in the period between 1990 and 1991, including Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Günther Förg, Reinhard Mucha, John Kessler and Clegg & Guttmann.
From 1991 to 1995, Kraus managed the non-commercial exhibition space K-raum Daxer in Munich, which was dedicated to the presentation of international art from the 1980s and 1990s. The main focus of her exhibition programme was on conceptual and contextual installations. In 1995 she became Katharina Sieverding’s assistant. Among other projects, she organised the artist presentation in the German pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennial, as well as solo exhibitions in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the German subsidiary of the Guggenheim in Berlin.
From 1999 to 2006 Kraus was director of the Kunstverein Braunschweig. In the main building, new movements from the 80s and 90s were combined with similar movements from the 60s and 70s. The studio, which was directly linked to the Salve Hospe villa, provided young, experimental art with a forum for creative discourse, in line with the almost 200-year-old basic concept behind the German art associations (‘Kunstvereine’) to actively promote contemporary art and culture.
From July 2006 until October 2010 she was director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, where in addition to solo exhibitions and a regular cycle of thematic group exhibitions, her programme also consisted of larger shows providing an overview of topics concerning the social development of art.
Karola Kraus
