The MAK Permanent Collection

The MAK’s renovation in 1986 went hand in hand with the development of new strategies for presenting the museum’s extensive collection. The project of redoing the permanent collection made it possible to present preservation-worthy items in an incomparable and exemplary interplay between artistic heritage and contemporary interventions by artists including Barbara Bloom, eichinger oder knechtl, Günther Förg, Gangart, Franz Graf, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Peter Noever, Manfred Wakolbinger, and Heimo Zobernig.

The various spaces of the Permanent Collection were organized in a chronological fashion, with the individual collection items arranged to produce congenial ensembles of outstanding works rather than a dense, serial presentation. The participating artists, whose interventions were developed via a process of intense collaboration with the MAK’s respective collection heads, arrived at highly diverse approaches and solutions.

With the directorship of Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, the Permanent Collection is to embark on a process of continual change, building on the established concept of contemporary transformation by artists working in the present. As a first step, the Wiener Werkstätte, Art Nouveau Art Deco and 20th/21st Century Architecture sections were closed in mid-July 2012; these reopened on 18 September 2013 as a permanent presentation of VIENNA 1900. Design / Arts and Crafts 1890–1938. After the reinstallation the Permanent Collection ASIA. China - Japan - Korea opened on 19 February 2014 and the Permanent Collection Carpets on 9 April 2014.

In contrast to the previous approach, these spaces will be reconceived as a dynamic display collection in which each periodic re-design of individual areas is to be accompanied by rotation of the objects on exhibit.

Silver for the MAK at the International Design & Communication Awards (Istanbul), 2015
The MAK scored with the reinstallation of the MAK Permanent Collection ASIA. China – Japan – Korea >>>

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.

Permanent Collection 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.

Permanent Collection 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.

Permanent Collection 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.

Permanent Collection 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.

Permanent Collection 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.

Permanent Collection 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.

Wiener Werkstätte

Permanent Collection / Designing artist: Heimo Zobernig

Permanent Collection Contemporary Art

Designing artist: Peter Noever

Permanent Collection Art Nouveau Art Deco

Designing artists: Eichinger oder Knechtl

Permanent Collection 20th/21st Century Architecture

Designing artist: Manfred Wakolbinger

Permanent Collection Asia

Design: Peter Noever

Permanent Collection Romanesque Gothic Renaissance

Artistic intervention: Günther Förg

Permanent Collection Orient

Artistic internvention: GANGART

The MAK Study Collection (1993-2013)

With the MAK’s renovation in 1986 and the associated development of new strategies for presenting the museum’s holdings, the MAK Permanent Collection—conceived to present the museum’s collection highlights in interplay with artistic interventions—was joined by the MAK Study Collection.

In the Study Collection, the MAK showed a small cross-section of its extensive holdings according to a material and technology-specific form of organization to which the respective collection curators’ specializations correspond. In this area of the museum, the items on exhibit were also embedded within their typological, historical and/or functional contexts.

With the directorship of Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, the Study Collection was developed further into a new kind of place for informal learning, with the numerous objects—placed on display either individually or in groups at regular periodic intervals within the context of new exhibiting formats—amounting to an overall presentation that is innovative in terms of both content and design. With the opening of the MAK DESIGN LAB on 12 May 2014, the museum has undertaken a radical new positioning of the former MAK Study Collection, and the design concept of the LAB has been consciously chosen as a contrast to the MAK Permanent Collection.