Course General Description

Sculpture is an opposition, a body, a tension. Sculpture suggests no ideal angle of observation for the viewer. Sculpture is movement. Engaged leg / free leg, the counterpose and what lies in between. Sculpture is spatial, even if intangible and it exists through the relation, we as observers are able to establish. The field of sculpture is potentially most open and broad. Sculpture is material and reflects material in combination with other possible materials and space itself. Space is order and context. Space is location. Sculpture connects with its environment, with the present and with society. Sculpture is presence and provokes immediate perception and experience. The consequences of these processes constantly demand to be questioned and debated anew.

School General Description

In the heart of Vienna, the capital of the Danube monarchy, the predecessor institution of the current University of Applied Arts, the Imperial Royal Arts and Crafts School, was founded in 1867. It was closely affiliated with the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (today the MAK), the first Arts and Crafts museum on the European continent. It was established in 1863 following the example of the South Kensington Museum in London, now the Victoria & Albert Museum, and was to serve as a collection of models for artists, industrialists, and the general public. At the time, early-industrialised England played a pioneer role in supporting a reformed Arts and Crafts movement in order to prevent its decline in the Machine Age. In the spirit of Historicism, the aim was to make it possible, also in Vienna, to study the great styles of the past by example of Arts and Crafts objects in the museum and to set up a place of advanced education for designers and craftsmen with the Arts and Crafts School in Vienna. It should train artists and teachers in equal measure to serve the demands of the art industry.