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.
A design intention = states of affairs. The wealth of appearances.The legacy of those who were here before us = the form of actions, our inheritance = memory: museums are also, like cemeteries,
our quiet bliss: because the nature of the encounter also gives rise to understanding: it seems there can be no truth concerning
this, but only original, brilliant works: silence is the word extinct. Because the same thing once meant something else: because
the essence of things is forever dead, and its material properties maintain this expansion into a different world: because
a past exists that the living individual can reach into and at least the possibility is hinted at of coming to an end through
oneself and beyond with the early ***** appearance. / Franz GrafThe MAK's collection of lace, and its holdings of glassware—especially Venetian glass—are considered among the finest
and most varied in the world. Even in the Baroque period, Venetian glasswork was particularly treasured, and both men and
women spent vast sums on the sumptuous lace decoration that fashion demanded.While glass-making is one of the oldest handicraft techniques in the world, the history of lace-making only begins in the
late Renaissance period, probably in Italy. A distinction is made between needlepoint lace and bobbin lace, but combinations
of the two techniques are often seen. Florence, and later Venice and Milan, were the centers of Italian lace-making in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before lace-making in France and Flanders began during the eighteenth century. Venice
was the center of European glass-making from the Middle Ages onwards. Around 1500, Venetian glass-makers succeeded in producing
clear, colorless glass. Glassblowing spread from Venice across the whole of Europe. In the north, centering on Bohemia and
Silesia, there was a preference for harder glass that could be decorated with relief or intaglio engraving, or glass decorated
with enamel, Schwarzlot ("black solder"), or gold. This presentation of glasswork and lacework is not based only on art-historical
criteria, but also on the visual effects of the materials—their "transparency", material delicacy, and the virtuosity
of the craftsmanship involved in their production—which may today be the aspect of them that arouses the greatest admiration.
/ Angela Völker (curator of the MAK Textiles and Carpets Collection during the phase of the reinstallation of the MAK Permanent
Collection in the early 1990s)
Biography
FRANZ GRAF
Born 1954 in Tulln, Lower Austria. Lives and works in Vienna.
Franz Graf is one of the most important representatives of a neo-conceptual position. His innovative combinations of divergent
media such as drawing, photography, and installation repeatedly lead to new and open structures. The spectrum of his motifs
ranges from abstract to ornamental, figurative and emblematic, or to factual representations of reality made with the camera.
Guided tours
Special guided tours by advance booking: Gabriele Fabiankowitsch, Head, MAK Educational Programs
T +43 1 711 36-298,
