Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna

The Museum of Applied Arts (German: Museum für angewandte Kunst), commonly called MAK, is a decorative arts museum located in Vienna, Austria. The museum is located in the Innere Stadt 1st district of Vienna.

Permanent Collection

Carpets

ARTISTIC INTERVENTION: FÜSUN ONUR

The MAK Carpet Collection is one of the most famous in the world. These unique pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries feature an incomparable variety of patterns and colors, materials, and techniques.

ASIA

CHINA – JAPAN – KOREA

The Asia Collection of the MAK is one of the important collections in Europe of art and applied arts from the Asian region. It has been compiled from public and private collections during a history lasting 150 years and offers a wide-ranging view of the art history of Asia.

Works on Paper Room

CURATOR: KATHRIN POKORNY-NAGEL

The Works on Paper Room is devoted exclusively to graphic art. This space features a multifunctional system of tracks holding mobile frames that can be converted to display cases as needed. Thematically, the material presented here encompasses commercial graphic art in the broadest sense. The diversity of the exhibition programming, which covers a range of topics including posters, hand drawings, Japanese woodcuts, individual artists’ stances, artists’ books and architectural projects, testifies to the underlying collection’s multilayered character.

Renaissance Baroque Rococo

ARTISTIC INTERVENTION: FRANZ GRAF

The joint arrangement of precious glasses with valuable needle and bobbin lace in the Renaissance Baroque Rococo Collection on permanent display not only complies with aspects of art history, but also places these delicate materials in a visual-sensuous dialogue with each other that enhances and accentuates their aesthetic effect with striking clarity.

Historicism Art Nouveau

ARTISTIC INTERVENTION: BARBARA BLOOM

The Historicism and Art Nouveau Collection on permanent display includes an overview of a hundred years of Thonet furniture production. These and other timeless items of bent wood furniture manifest a creative approach that ingeniously exploits the properties of the material and points to new ways ahead for seating furniture.

Empire Style Biedermeier

ARTISTIC INTERVENTION: JENNY HOLZER

Besides brilliant achievements in the arts and crafts production in Austria in the nineteenth century, the Empire and Biedermeier Collection on permanent display shows the creative and material versatility of an epoch marked by cultural, social and economic upheavals in the wake of the industrial revolution.

Vienna 1900

DESIGN/ARTS AND CRAFTS 1890–1938

This presentation’s thematic core is the multifarious struggle to arrive at an Austrian, modern, bourgeois, and democratic style. Today, this chapter of design and arts and crafts history—subsumed under the terms of Secessionism and Jugendstil—serves like no other to underpin Austrian identity.

Baroque Rococo Classicism

ARTISTIC INTERVENTION: DONALD JUDD

With a unique artistic intervention Donald Judd managed to blend the different stylistic worlds of the Baroque, Rococo, Classicism and Minimalism. Taking on a central position here is the Porcelain Chamber from the Palais Dubsky in Brno, one of the first rooms ever designed in European porcelain.