Armchair „Spitting Image“
Design and execution: Rolf Sachs, Germany, 2008
Urethane resin, molded
MAK H 4004/2019, Donation Rolf Sachs
Shadow Object „Hermann Czech“
Design and execution: Markus Wilfling, Austria, 2007
Beech, solid and bent, paint
MAK GK 564/2007
In the course of the 20th century, everyday objects have increasingly crept into art, where they have gone through their own process of development as artistic counterparts of ordinary commodities: All sorts of household items, furniture, garments, and utensils have - particularly in art since the 1960s - been presented, reproduced, reworked, rebuilt, used, alienated, rendered useless and destroyed, or fundamentally redesigned, in a variety of forms, materials, and techniques. As a frequently chosen starting point or vanishing point of artistic work, furniture in particular has in this way gained completely new aesthetic and symbolic qualities. Again and again, very special or very simple and widely used bentwood furniture has become a focus of artistic attention. In 2008, for example, the artist Rolf Sachs used Model No. 3 - Thonet’s most successful desk chair, which was produced and offered in various designs from the end of the 19th century - for a casting called “spitting image” made of semi-transparent amber-colored urethane resin in order to free the furniture forms of their functionality and to renegotiate aesthetically. With similar intentions, in 2007 Markus Wilfling transformed two chairs from the MAK restaurant, which was furnished by Hermann Czech in 1993, into one of his “shadow objects,” which made reference to the capitalist double existence of objects between economic exchange value and practical value: “This double existence of every object creates a shadow world, a world of phantoms and spectres, which do nonetheless exist: The real phantoms of the capitalist product world, the fetishes, stand alongside or opposite each other in Wilfling’s sculpture.”
Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Curator, MAK Furniture and Woodwork Collection
