In 1969, the furniture exhibition Sitzen 69 [Seating 69] took place in the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (today’s MAK) in which a comprehensive selection of dignified “joiner’s chairs” from Scandinavia, Italy, Germany, and Austria was presented. However, the many colorful and trendy seats that today seem so characteristic of this epoch, were missing: The exhibition had made a last heroic attempt to reply to an increasingly pronounced consumer and throwaway society with traditional of high-quality, artisanal furniture.
 
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Sitzen 69, the exhibition “SITZEN 69” REVISITED offers an opportunity not only to look back on the era of the 1960s, which was decisive for the development of international design, but also to reconstruct an important chapter in the museum policy of the MAK. Through the meaningful juxtaposition of the dignified joiner’s chairs, which were intended at that time as an impulse for craftsmen, producers, and consumers, and the playful and crazy furniture objects now shown, which have become the epitome of alternative and utopian living concepts of the 1960s, a great omission can be compensated for.

Curator: Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Curator, MAK Furniture and Woodwork Collection

Opening

Tue, 12 November 2019, 7 p.m.
Free admission
Facebook-Event

On the exhibition
Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, General Director, MAK
Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Curator, MAK Furniture and Woodwork Collection