Carl Auböck's masterpieces go on display in Vienna

For over a century, the Auböck family has stood at the forefront of Austrian design, spearheading the Wiener Werkstätte movement and creating some highly collectable modernist designs, including brass candlesticks, elegant glass and leather carafes and hand-shaped paperweights. Now under the helm of the fourth generation of the family, the company is the focus of a new exhibition at MAK, Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, titled ‘Iconic Auböck: A Workshop Shapes Austria’s Concept of Design’ (until 13 October 2024).

‘Iconic Auböck: A Workshop Shapes Austria’s Concept of Design’

The handmade classics of the Carl Auböck workshop have influenced Austrian design since 1906, starting from the collectible animal statues of Karl Heinrich Auböck I, inspired by the turn-of-the-century craze from Vienna Bronzes. He was followed by Carl Auböck II, one of the first students to attend the Bauhaus; Carl Auböck III, an architect inspired by his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carl Auböck IV, who today works from the exact same Viennese workshop, in the Bernardgasse of Vienna’s 7th District, as his forebears.

Featuring around 400 exhibits, including many unique items and prototypes, the MAK’s comprehensive show ‘explores the materiality of Auböck’s hugely diverse creations in brass, wood, horn, leather, and natural fibres’. It focuses mostly ‘on the workshop’s stylistically formative interwar and postwar years and on the experimental 1980s’, highlighting beautiful everyday items such as corkscrews, chess sets and clocks, most of which were designed by Carl Auböck II.

Auböck II, a Bauhaus student mentored by painter and art theoretician Johannes Itten, was interested in the form-giving qualities of line and movement, and the concept of the objet trouvé. His avant-garde creations often combine abstract and organic elements with a touch of surrealism, with his set of paperweights (a miniature hand, foot, and egg – an homage to Constantin Brâncuși) taking pride of place on the writing desk of none other than the Bauhaus’ Walter Gropius.

Curated by Bärbel Vischer and including a selection of exceptional standing and table lamps from the 1950s, the MAK exhibition explores this surrealist slant, highlighting Auböck II’s taste for ‘irreconcilable combinations, abstract compositions, and visual jokes’ that ‘often hide – in a tongue-in-cheek way – their real purpose from both observer and user’.

The MAK also presents for the first time works by Carl Auböck II’s wife, the sculptor and textile artist Mara Uckunowa, whom he met at the Bauhaus. Influenced by the works of Itten and Josef Albers, her abstract fabric designs from the 1940s boast remarkable textures and colours.

‘Iconic Auböck: A Workshop Shapes Austria’s Concept of Design’ is on view until 13 October 2024

MAK
Stubenring 5
1010 Vienna
Austria

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