Ron Arad MAK, Vienna, Austria 4 February – 5 April 2009 The Viennese museum of applied arts, MAK (Museum für angewandte Kunst), focuses on collecting activities spanning over many centuries and genres – its collections contain products of Wiener Werkstätte, Thonet bent-wood furniture and architectonic models created by famous names (Frank O. Gehry, Lebbeus Woods, Zaha Hadid and others) – as well as presenting contemporary art and design. MAK is thus a center which confronts the “old” and the “new” and which has turned Vienna into a meeting place of the international design elite, entrepreneurs, artists and visionaries from London, Milan and Vienna who, through lectures, public discussions and presentations of objects explain their new approaches and concepts in detail. In the framework of this project which is indeed far from modest, MAK now presents Ron Arad (1951) from Tel Aviv who presently lives and works in London. The artist gained fame for his unique chairs of steel, bronze, aluminum, plastic and wood which are more breathtaking sculptures than furniture. Apart from other items, the MAK exhibition displays Arad’s famed rotation shower “Rotator”, designed for the Teuco Italian producer of sanitary furnishings, in which he succeeded in totally inverting our hitherto ideas of how a shower should look like. Arad’s oeuvre is characteristic of combining various materials and their unconventional use that breaks all