Shiro Kuramata is one of Japan's most influential designers who succeeded in combinating Western traditions with Japanese ways of perception. This is the MAK's first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to his life's work and comprising furniture pieces, objects, original drawings an plans as well as photographs documenting his shop and restaurant interiors.
Kuramata always played with form and function and continually experimented with unconventional materials. While the lightness of his early furniture pieces is rather due to their structure than to their material, Kuramata began to use transparent materials like perspex, expanded metal and acrylic glass in the eighties in order to achieve an impression of elegance and refinement.
Together with Peter Noever, Ettore Sottsass, the important Italian designer and Kuramata's former teacher, installed the exhibition which was prepared by the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.