Karlheinz Essl senior

Karlheinz Essl senior (born April 16, 1939 in Hermagor , Carinthia) is an Austrian entrepreneur and art collector.

Life

He expanded the trading company of his father-in-law Fritz Schömer and founded the Baumax hardware store chain in 1976 , which operated stores not only in Austria, but also in numerous Eastern and Central European countries. At the height of his entrepreneurial career, he was one of the richest Austrians.

His administration building in Klosterneuburg , which he had built in 1985 based on plans by Heinz Tesar , housed his collection of important contemporary art, which he and his wife Agnes had been building up since the 1970s. In 1999 he had Heinz Tesar build the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg for this purpose. With 7,000 works (as of 2011), the Essl Collection is one of the largest private collections of contemporary art in Austria. When the museum also got into trouble due to problems at Baumax, Hans Peter Haselsteiner acquired the majority of the art collection in 2014. This should continue to exist (partly in the Künstlerhaus Wien, also supported by Haselsteiner ), but the museum in Klosterneuburg was, as Essl announced at the beginning of April 2016, closed for financial reasons on July 1, 2016.

Karlheinz Essl is the brother of Georg Essl III. and father of the composer Karlheinz Essl (* 1960) and the entrepreneur Martin Essl (* 1962).

Awards

• 1995: WU Manager of the Year

Web links

• Literature by and about Karlheinz Essl senior in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Karlheinz Essl senior in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
• Entry for Karlheinz Essl senior in the database of the state's memory for the history of the state of Lower Austria ( Museum Niederösterreich )
• Essl Collection in the Essl Museum: Contemporary Art

Individual evidence

1. ↑ WU Manager on the website of the Vienna University of Economics and Business ( Memento from October 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved June 17, 2015.