Aldo Rossi honored with a retrospective in Milan
Conceptor, designer and architectural theorist, Aldo Rossi is one of the major artists of the visual culture of the XXand century. He is at the center of the exhibition Aldo Rossi. Design 1960-1997, curated by Chiara Spangaro for the Museo del Novecento in Milan. For the first time, in a spectacular route, the exhibition presents until October 2, 2022 more than 350 pieces of furniture and everyday objects, prototypes and models, paintings, drawings and studies designed and produced by Aldo Rossi from 1960 to 1997.
Since his first pieces of furniture made in 1960 with Leonardo Ferrari, Rossi has reflected on the relationship uniting the architectural and urban scale with the monumental and object scale. 1979, Rossi, first since Italian winner of the Pritzker Prize (1990), merged the world of industrial production and craftsmanship, conforming furniture and products with Alessi, Artemide, DesignTex, Bruno Longoni Atelier, Molteni&C|UniFor, Richard-Ginori, Rosenthal and Up&Up (now UpGroup).
In almost twenty years of work, he has designed more than 70 pieces of furniture and objects, many of which are still in production, experimenting with shapes and colors in the fields of metals and wood, marble and stone, ceramics and porcelain, artisanal and industrial textiles and plastics.
The exhibition, including an installation designed by Morris Adjmi – MA Architects, a collaborator and partner of Rossi in New York, recounts the career of Aldo Rossi in nine plays. The first presents the relationship between the painted image and the reality of the object, the second is devoted to the prototypes and variants of an imaginary domestic interior and then leads to the reconstruction of a poetic environment in the third room, where works such as the series Paris (UniFor, 1994) and service Tea and coffee place (Alessi, 1983) constituting the visual and metaphysical focal point, embellished with unpublished drawings from Rossi’s house in Via Rugabella.
The fourth room evokes the lines of the Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena and introduces the Apollonian geometric figures used by the architect in design and architecture, a theme taken up in the next room, the fifth: prototypes for Richard-Ginori and Rosenthal, to the architectural plans of the Monumento ai Partigiani in Segrate and the Scuola di Fagnano Olona, passing through the carpets made with ARP Studio in Sardinia (1986) or the wooden inlays by Bruno Longoni Atelier (1997). The sixth room contains chairs, armchairs, large pieces of furniture with their variations of materials and colors, from the iconic desk Papyrus (Molteni&C, 1989) and the small table Tabularium (Up&Up, 1985).
The seventh room brings together Rossi’s furniture and objects, mixed with others he collected and kept at home, including American coffee pots, an engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and a 19th century sideboard.and century (which inspired its design). The relationship with architecture, common thread of the exhibition, is evident in the section devoted to furniture (eighth room): the seat for the Carlo Felice theater in Genoa (Molteni&C|UniFor, 1990) or the chair Museum made for the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht (UniFor, 1994). The magical and hieratic presence of World Theaterwhich revealed the exhibition, evokes the temporary wooden constructions and will ideally bring us back to the initial core of the works.
Twenty-five years after the death of the Milanese architect, Aldo Rossi. Design 1960-1997 draws the spectator into an unexpected story rich in imagination, which oscillates between form and use, classicism, irony and metaphysics, in which a library takes the form of a steamer (with Luca Meda for Molteni&C, 1991), The Conic we The dome are now coffee machines (Alessi, 1984 and 1988) or elements of the Teatro Domestico (XVII Triennale di Milano, 1986).
The extraordinary collection of exhibited works has been made possible by the collaboration between museum institutions and the company’s archives: Museo Alessi, Molteni Museum, archives of Bruno Longoni Atelier and Up Group, Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Center Georges Pompidou of Paris, Fondazione Museo Archivio Richard-Ginori della Manifattura di Doccia of Florence, MAXXI – Museo delle arti del XXI secolo of Rome, University Iuav of Venice, Triennale of Milan and numerous private collections.
During the opening period, the exhibition will be enriched by a full program of side events.
Original article published in AD Italy.
Translation Perrine Chambon