VALLY WIESELTHIER

Name: short and sweet: VALLY WIESELTHIER
Start: 2026-05-19T18:15
End: 2026-05-19T18:45
Location: MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

Ceramic Sculptor

The comprehensive exhibition VALLY WIESELTHIER: Ceramic Sculptor is dedicated by the MAK to Viennese ceramist Vally Wieselthier’s (1895–1945) career in Europe and in the United States, where she lived and worked from 1928 on.

29.4.2026—10.1.2027

Central Room MAK Design Lab

The show was occasioned by her American family’s bequest of a part of her impressive oeuvre.

One of Josef Hoffmann’s and Michael Powolny’s students at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, Wieselthier was the most prominent representative of a Wiener Werkstätte Ceramics wholly influenced by women artists. From 1927 she headed the production facility, where she developed a new form of ceramic sculpture of heretofore unknown expressivity.

The MAK exhibition had access to significant objects from European collections as well as from her estate in the USA, some never exhibited before now. Through the archive of the Wiener Werkstätte, the MAK already possessed incomparable sources and objects from her life and work, which now have been substantially augmented through the gift to the museum of her entire works on paper bequest; and which allow her career in the USA, little known on these shores, to be traced.

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Vally Wieselthier in front of her sculpture “Modern Youth”

Illustration featuring people dressed in festive attire

Colorful design for a Wiener Werkstätte poster

Clay cover of the publication *Die Wiener Werkstätte 1903–1928: Modern Arts and Crafts and Its Path*

Photo by Vally Wieselthier and sculpture

Exhibition view featuring two pedestals and sculptures by Vally Wieselthier

Exhibition view featuring a podium and sculptures by Vally Wieselthier

VALLY WIESELTHIER: Ceramic Sculptor accentuates her preeminent role in the art scenes of both continents and illuminates Wieselthier’s lasting impact on Austrian ceramic art to this day. In the lead-up to the show, exhibitions and symposia will take place in New York with the MAK’s involvement; a conference also will be held at the MAK in the fall of 2026.

Curators: Rainald Franz, Curator, MAK Glass and Ceramics Collection; Anne-Katrin Rossberg, Curator, MAK Metal Collection and Wiener Werkstätte Archive

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