Johannes Wieninger – Shards

Johannes Wieninger

Shards

In this work Scherben (Shards), which he created especially for the MAK DESIGN LAB, the artist Jörg Ahrnt (1965) draws from the fragments of ceramic vessels in the MAK Collection and places them into new juxtapositions.

In the Persian tradition, vessels and their simple yet highly concentrated fabrication were regarded as the embodiment of philosophical thought. Poets and mystics saw the very malleability of clay as symbolizing all of creation. The open form of a vessel represented an inner readiness to be open to the unknown.

The fragments selected by the artist hail from different cultures of the Near East and Middle East. They give us an idea of how ornamentation was used to structure surfaces and to place forms and colors into playful alliance. Who dug up the shards and where can no longer be determined exactly.