Carl Auböck II / Werkstätte Carl Auböck

My Son (#4752)

Patinated brass on polished brass base

Vienna, designed c. 1950s; this example signed and dated 1998

7 × 2 × 2 in.

Elongated standing figure with arms folded, head tipped back, jacket and trousers reduced to a few incised lines. Dark hand-worked patina on the body against a bright circular brass plinth. Designed by Carl Auböck II as a portrait of his son—spare, slightly wry, and immediately recognizable as Auböck.

Cast and finished in the original Vienna workshop from the historic molds. Signed and dated 1998.

Werkstätte Carl AuböckFounded in Vienna around 1906–1912 by Karl Heinrich Auböck as a workshop for Wiener Bronzen. His son Carl Auböck II (1900–1957), trained at the Weimar Bauhaus under Johannes Itten, redirected the shop toward modernist brass objects—paperweights, figures, tableware, furniture—that mixed utility with dry humor. With his son Carl Auböck III (1924–1993), an architect and industrial designer who studied at MIT and knew Gropius and the Eameses, the workshop won four gold medals at the 1954 Milan Triennale and supplied Hermès, Tiffany, and Neiman Marcus.

The atelier remains in the same 7th-district townhouse on Bernardgasse, now run by Carl Auböck IV with his sister Maria. Production is still small-batch and hand-finished from an archive of more than 4,500 designs.