Transforming Reality: Italian Design Innovation and Fantasy

May 17, 2014 – September 07, 2014 Transforming Reality: Italian Design Innovation and Fantasy exhibition opened on May 17 in Eagle Gallery, featuring a selection of Italian decorative arts pieces from the Gerard L. Cafesjian Collection, created by internationally renowned design studios and artists, such as Gaetano Pesce, Andrea Branzi, Piero Fornasetti and others.

Gaetano Pesce (b. 1939) is one of the most versatile and unconventional artists of the 20th century. He has been expanding the notions and structures of modern design throughout his entire career that spans four decades with commissions in architecture, urban planning, interior, exhibition and industrial design. His work features the artist’s guiding principle that modernism is less a style than a method for interpreting the present and hinting at the future in which individuality is preserved and celebrated. Famous for his experiments with modern materials such as resin, foam, and innovative production techniques his works dissolve the boundaries between art and design reflecting the artist’s search for new forms of expression that are sensually personal, philosophical, and often political. His signature piece the Donna Model No. Up 5 and Up 6 convey the artist’s socio-political statement about the captivity of women. Pesce’s work is featured in over 30 permanent collections of the most important museums in the world, such as MoMa and Metropolitan Museum in New York, Vitra Museum in Germany, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Pompidou Center and Musee des Arts Décoratifs of Louvre in Paris. 

Design, bravely operating within the world of production and consumption, has gained its new found supremacy through being the only planning entity, able to transform reality. 
Andrea Branzi

Andrea Branzi (b. 1938) is one of the greatest visionaries and theoreticians of the 20th century architecture and design. His work and interests relate to industrial and research design, architecture, urban planning and cultural promotion. Branzi is one of the founders of the Archizoom Associati group - the first avant-garde design studio on the international scene, which played a leading role in the Radical Movement (the Italian "Radical" period took place in the late 1960s) and New Design in Italy. He is one of the co-founders of the school of radical architecture “Global tools” in 1973, which was aimed at promoting individual creativity and non-industrial production. In 1983 he became one of the founders of the “Domus Academy” - the first international post-graduate school of design. In 2008 Andrea Branzi was named an Honorary Royal Designer in the United Kingdom. 

Industry is the style of the 20th century, its mode of creation.
Gio Ponti

These are the words of Gio Ponti (1891-1979), architect, industrial designer, painter, poet, and the founding editor of “Domus” magazine, whose versatile and prolific career in architecture and design production predetermined the discourse of the Italian post-war design renaissance. Forerunner of modernist disciplines and rationalist approaches in Italy, Ponti developed his unique aesthetics of modernism, which drew on Italy’s Roman heritage and Viennese traditions. Propagating synthesis of different fields of art and design, Ponti never viewed architecture as simply creating buildings. His goal was to integrate the art and architecture, often conceiving of the building’s interior too, creating furniture -- chairs, coffee tables, lighting appliances, and even items like ceramics and glassware. His unique designs still have relevance today, and some creations are continually re-issued by various manufacturers. Among his important architectural buildings are Pirelli Tower in Milan (1956) and Denver Art Museum (1972).

Piero Fornasetti (1913-1988) is a Milanese painter, engraver and printer, designer, collector, stylist, refined craftsman, one of the most celebrated creative talents of the 20th century. Captivated by the past greatness of Italian culture, surrealist art and surrounding universe, the artist with “volcanic creativity and imagination” developed an eclectic style of a magical world, saturated with distinctive ornamental and pictorial motifs, among which the most recurrent ones are the sun, the moon, harlequins, hands, self-portraits and the most famous -- the enigmatic face of an opera singer Lina Cavalieri. The encounter and long lasting collaboration with the architect and designer Gio Ponti was significant for further promotion of Fornasetti’s decorative and imaginative vision of design. Free from the ruling rationalistic dogma of functionality in architecture and design, Fornasetti created a visual vocabulary that elevated the status and significance of decoration and ornament in the Decorative Arts scene of the 20th century. 

The architectural designers Donato D'Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi and Jonathan De Pas are among the leading representatives of Italian radical design of the 60s, whose works notable for introduction of industrial design and technologies with pop culture, challenged the traditional notions of crafts and brought new esthetics to interior design objects. Designed in 1970 as a tribute to American baseball player Joe DiMaggio, famous for his homeruns and his ill-fated marriage to movie icon Marilyn Monroe, this gigantic baseball glove entitled 'Joe' is undoubtedly one of the iconic pieces of modern design.

A symbol of popular culture and icon of modern design - the Bocca Lips Sofa was originally conceived by Salvador Dalí, featuring the lips of famous American actress Mae West. The piece on exhibit designed by Studio 65 for Gufram Italy in the 1970s is a tribute to Dalí and portrays the lips of Marilyn Monroe.