Kero Fichter

Kero Fichter is a Vienna-based art historian and writer whose work focuses on queer readings of Western visual culture, especially Renaissance and early modern art. Fichter’s public and curatorial work has addressed sexuality, gender relations, body images, and the visibility of queer desire in historical art and museum interpretation.

Education and career

Fichter studied at the University of Glasgow and the University of Vienna. In 2021, Fichter completed a master's thesis at the University of Vienna titled Two contour copies after Hans Baldung Grien and the sexualisation of the Fall of Man in the German Renaissance, supervised by Werner Telesko.

From 2021 to 2023, Fichter worked for Hessen Kassel Heritage.

Queer art history and museum work

Fichter’s work has focused on queer interpretations of historical visual culture and on how museums, catalogues, and archives shape the visibility of gender, sexuality, and desire. His art-historical work has been described as a form of queer media archaeology concerned with how bodies, desire, and gender become legible through historical visual regimes. He has also regularly presented public lectures and museum formats on art history, gender, sexuality, and queer readings of historical visual culture.

At Hessen Kassel Heritage, Fichter contributed to Alte Meister que(e)r gelesen / Old Masters – A Queer Reading, an exhibition at Schloss Wilhelmshöhe that presented works from the Old Masters collection through questions of sexuality, gender expression, and body images. The exhibition was covered by Die Tageszeitung, which described it as bringing together works from antiquity to around 1800 in order to ask how gender was represented in premodern art and how fluid such representations could appear. queer.de also discussed the accompanying catalogue as an example of self-confident queer readings of historical art.

Fichter co-curated the Queer Museum Vienna lecture series What’s Missing?, with Florian Aschka and Eugenia Seleznova. The series addressed queer visibility in museums and archives across different historical and cultural contexts. Fichter’s lecture in the series, Where Have All the Lesbians Gone?, examined representations of female same-[...] desire and the male gaze in Renaissance and Baroque art.

Fichter has also participated in the Belvedere museum’s Queering the Belvedere programme, including a public event on Isabella von Parma with Francesca Liva.

In March 2025, Fichter presented the lecture The Love of Statues: The Beginnings of Objectophilia in Western Art at Arse Elektronika 2025: Plug & Play! in Vienna. The talk addressed histories of attraction to statues and artificial humanoid figures in Western art, from antiquity to modern robotics.

Reception

In June 2026, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard profiled Fichter in connection with the Belvedere programme Queering the Belvedere, discussing Fichter’s work on queer readings of historical art and museum interpretation.

Fichter’s work has also been discussed in cultural, art-critical, and activist contexts, including in a 2026 essay published by paraflows, as an example of queer approaches to art history, visual culture, and institutional critique. Commentators including Johannes Grenzfurthner and Benno Hilgers have linked this approach to questions of archives, visibility, visual ambiguity, and the historical conditions under which bodies and desire become legible.

The catalogue of Alte Meister que(e)r gelesen has also been cited outside the museum context. A 2024 publication by the equality office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover cited Fichter’s catalogue essay “Bromance or Romance?” in a discussion of queer-sensitive cultural and educational work.

Selected writings

• Fichter, Kero. Two contour copies after Hans Baldung Grien and the sexualisation of the Fall of Man in the German Renaissance. MA thesis, University of Vienna, 2021.
• Fichter, Kero. "Experiment Buch um 1500. Spielräume für Künstler und Auftraggeber." Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege, 2020.
• Fichter, Kero. "Historische Perspektiven." Text accompanying an exhibition by Offerus Ablinger, 2020.
• Fichter, Kero. "Von verliebten Göttern und busengreifenden Nymphen – Wie spiegeln sich queere Identitäten in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit?" In Alte Meister que(e)r gelesen, Hessen Kassel Heritage, 2023.
• Fichter, Kero. "Bromance or Romance? Homosozialität und die Spielräume gleichgeschlechtlichen Begehrens in der Frühen Neuzeit." In Alte Meister que(e)r gelesen, Hessen Kassel Heritage, 2023.
• Fichter, Kero, and Johanna Frankfurth. "Ein Blick in die Hauptstadt: Das Schwule Museum in Berlin." In Alte Meister que(e)r gelesen, Hessen Kassel Heritage, 2023.
• Fichter, Kero. "Breaking the Canon – Wie man die Kunst der Renaissance und des Barocks queert." Kunst und Kaviar, 2023.
• Fichter, Kero. Contribution in Plug & Play. Edited by Johannes Grenzfurthner, Günther Friesinger, and Jasmin Hagendorfer. monochrom, forthcoming 2026.

External links

• Kero Fichter at DailyArt Magazine
• "Breaking the Canon – Wie man die Kunst der Renaissance und des Barocks queert" at Kunst und Kaviar