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Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto
In his sixty years' career Ettore Sottsass, an eclectic and versatile person who it is difficult to place according to aesthetic canons and who has many times been disputed, has been a designer, architect, urban planner, painter, voyager, and photographer. His artistic, ethical, and existential research led him to contacts with Rationalism, the Arte Concreta movement, Spatialism, and Pop culture.
The important moments in his career from 1948 onwards - a global inquiry that has also involved the very sense of human existence - are now to be seen at MART in Rovereto, in an ample and carefully constructed show that, from 26th February, will pay tribute to the figure of the architect and designer Sottsass: a recognition that the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris has already accorded him in a large exhibition in 1994 but which has been so far lacking here in Italy. Born in Innsbruck in 1917, when he chose architecture as a career, he was following in the footsteps of his father, of whom MART conserves a rich archival fund in its Architectural Archives. From the fifties onwards Sottsass junior has backed up his architectural activity with that of designer. As such he has collaborated with important firms, among them Olivetti, where he was in charge of design for over thirty years and for which he created objects that have become icons for design worldwide. He has also collaborated with many important galleries and museums.
The MART show, curated by Gabriella Belli and Milco Carboni, will investigate these two sides of the activity of the by now 87 year old Ettore Sottsass in two separate thematic sections, one devoted to non-industrial design and the other to architecture, arranged in strictly philological order with both old and recent material, including work not previously exhibited. 'For me design is a way of talking about life. It is a way of talking about society, politics, eroticism, food and even design. Finally it is a way of constructing a possible figurative utopia or of constructing a metaphor of life. Of course, for me design is not limited by the need to give some kind of form to a stupid product for a more or less sophisticated industry; and so, if you must teach something about design you must, first of all, teach something about life and you must also ram the lesson home by explaining that technology is one of the metaphors of life'. Sottsass has completely renewed the concept of 'functionalism' typical of the first half of the twentieth century by giving back to objects their symbolic and emotional value. And so in the field of design we will be presenting the various kinds of projects he has been involved in with their ever new forms, materials, and colours: jewellery, glass, ceramics, and furniture in a continual dialogue between finished objects and drawings.
For this event, though, we have decided to exclude the best-known and documented aspect of Sottsass's activity: industrial design which, anyway, he abandoned some decades back. Here then is his jewellery, ranging from the sixties up to today, and shown together for the first time: both those created for Walter De Mario and now in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and those designed for Cleto Munari.
Then there are the glass works, numerous examples of which will be shown at MART and which will show Sottsass's experiences of and passion for this sensuous material with all its colours, transparency, lightness and fragility. Of this aspect of his production we will be showing works ranging from original forms of coloured glass designed in 1975 and produced in a limited edition by the Vistosi glass works in Murano for Artemide, to the production for the Memphis group made by the Toso glass works, and to the Baccarat crystal-ware of 2002 and his most recent pieces. There will also be an exceptional section devoted to the ceramics: this will be the most important retrospective of this sector of Sottsass's work. Here his interpretation of the meeting of oriental spirituality and western materialism can be seen in the ceramics for Bitossi dating from the fifties and sixties - those titled Offerta a Shiva or Menhir, Ziggurat, and Stupas - as much as in his series Indian memory produced for Alessio Sarri in 1972. There will also be on show ceramics belonging to Sottsass himself as well as the first view of the ceramics produced for the Mourmans gallery. Overall there will be some hundred works, amongst which the Ceramiche delle Tenebre (The Ceramics of Darkness), 1963: highly symbolic works with great importance for the personal and design career of Sottsass - they were thought up while he was seriously ill in hospital - and made the most of here by a very particular installation, with direct lighting concentrated on the works in a completely darkened room.
But it is above all in the design of furniture that Sottsass's force for creative renewal shows how it can overcome obstacles and reveals why this architect is a central figure in international design. Before the 'years of tension' he had chosen design as a tool for social criticism and had begun the path to the great period of radical design (1966-1972) as well as affirming the need for a new aesthetic: one that was more ethical, social, and political. Disillusioned by an ever more voracious industry, Sottsass happily accepted the influences of contemporary avant-garde movements - Pop, Arte Povera, and Conceptualism - with the idea of creating a 'comforting' design, an alternative kind of consumerism to that of the 'advertising society'.
After the highly experimental work for Poltronova - for example, the Superboxes: wide-based wardrobes laminated with printed stripes like those of road signs or petrol stations - Sottsass's utopian vein had its high point in Italy: the New Domestic Landscape, 1972, a show at MoMA in which his Micro Environment - a grey and futuristic 'house-environment' some of the furniture of which will be on display at MART - was aimed at 'neutralising' a culture ruled by rationalist laws: 'I wanted the home to become a single environment and not various rooms expressing different moments of existence', the artist said. Sottsass then moved on to the experiences with the Alchimia group which made concrete his ideology and planning of the 'radical design' years: an alchemy of forms, colours, and materials that overturned aesthetic canons and the way of considering design versus ornament.
On show in Rovereto there will be some of the furniture seen in the group's first show, at the Design Forum in Linz, in 1979: the Seggiolina da pranzo (Dining Chair) (in chromed iron and laminated in Abet Print), the standard-lamp Svincolo (with pink and blue neon lights), and the table Le strutture tremano (Trembling Structures) (wood, laminate, enamelled metal, and crystal). Then there was the extraordinary experience of the Memphis group which Sottsass founded together with Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaky, Andreas Branzi, Michele de Lucchi, and other international architects who were to change the face of contemporary furniture. 'Memphis gives objects a symbolic, emotive, and ritual depth. The basis of absurd and monumental pieces of furniture is emotion before function'.
This is the case with Sottsass's Carlton, a bookshelf halfway between a totem and a video-game. A 'playful answer to the need for solid and enjoyable forms: a way of linking, not without irony, the sacred and the profane, history and actuality, the archetype and its manifestations'. This furniture - Beverly, Casablanca etc. - was designed between 1981 and 1985 and is among his best-known objects, real icons of modernity. And, finally, to show the later activity of Sottsass, by now created only for art galleries and far from the problems of contemporary industrial design, MART will be displaying furniture made for the Blum Helman gallery, New York, and the Mourmans gallery. The second part of the show will be the first retrospective view of Ettore Sottsass as architect, and will show - through his drawings, sketches, and models - the whole range of his activity, from the first works in collaboration with his father at the beginning of the fifties, to the period of 'radical architecture', a moment of strong criticism of contemporary culture in which traditional architectural planning was substituted by conceptual and utopian projects with a strongly ironic character. There will also be the designs realised with the Sottsass e Associati studio and those currently in production. Sottsass's architecture is constructed around mankind: an anthropocentric creativity and design - for example, Casa Wolf, Casa Olabuenaga, Casa Cei, Casa Bischofberger, Il Museo dell'Arredo Contemporaneo (Museum of Contemporary Furnishing), Ravenna, the Casa degli Uccelli (House of Birds) etc. - aimed at establishing an organic contact between nature and construction, following an ideal of peasant sagacity and interpreting the prescriptions of the genius loci. Hollein has written: 'Sottsass is a master of a kind of architecture that cannot be quantified ... For Sottsass the passages between artistic expressions are fluid, there do not exist demarcation lines between sculpture, painting, architecture, and design: Sottsass overcame these limits some time ago'. Altogether a master of extraordinary, ironical, and fresh creativity who continues to amaze us. The Sottsass exhibition will have a valuable catalogue published by Skira titled Sottsass 700 disegni, edited by Milco Carboni, and which follows the graphic and, therefore, creative thought of Sottsass from 1936 until 2004.