Design can even have a therapeutic power, or at least that is what the Italian Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) thought, one of the great creators in this field during the 20th century, who stars in the new temporary exhibition of the Pompidou Center in Malaga .
As its curator, Marie-Ange Brayer, pointed out this Wednesday in the presentation, Sottsass was one of the most outstanding designers of the last century and was able to go through very different artistic periods, which are present in this exhibition with more than a hundred pieces .
Not only are his furniture or his typewriters designed for Olivetti, but also his notebooks, photographs, documents or agendas, “which can rarely be seen, to show his entire artistic process.”
“The exhibition begins with his agendas, which are works of art because they brought together his activities, his drawings and the mental space where he organized all his work,” highlights Brayer.
Chronological tour
The chronological journey begins with a more unknown period, that of the 1930s and 1940s, when there was still no training as a designer and he traveled to Turin to train as an architect, the same profession that his father had, although he also studied painting.
During those 1930s, influences from artists such as De Chirico and the artistic avant-garde of the moment can be seen in his drawings, and with the rise of fascism in Italy “he looked for paths to cross, which he found in painting.”
In the war “he suffers a traumatic experience and death haunts him throughout his life,” and after the war he returns to Milan, with his father, and participates in the reconstruction.
“These are years of great poverty for the artist, in which he gathers small objects like wires. In 1946 or 1947 he began to make pieces marked by the recovery of materials and expressed his interest in poor objects,” explains the curator.
Interior designs
Then he began to work on complete interior and office designs, and “from the beginning his innovative nature caught our attention. As well as his desire to invent his own artistic language”, until in 1958 Adriano Olivetti crossed his life.
“Olivetti was a different businessman, a great humanist who wanted to give another framework of life to the workers, and in Sottsass he found an ‘alter ego’. He completely trusts him, hires him that year and becomes an industrial designer.”
In 1959 he designed the first Italian computer, the Elea 9003, followed by typewriters such as the Tekne 3 or the Praxis 48. And, especially, the legendary Valentine (1968), which became an icon of design due to its color. red and its lightness. And that can be seen in Malaga.
Sottsass “pays the same attention to small objects, such as ashtrays, as he would a large closet,” says Brayer. He highlights that his collaboration with Olivetti “marks the birth of industrial design in Italy and Europe.”
Upon his return from a trip to India in the 1960s, he fell seriously ill. “And that experience between life and death transforms their design practice.”
Abandon the design
“It returns to poor objects, and the piece is not only functional, but has a ritual and symbolic power that can heal. He works with ceramics made of earth and clay and creates masterful and very rare pieces that are present in this exhibition,” explains Brayer.
Already in the 70s, he abandoned design and dedicated himself to traveling around the world to take photographs. And the last stage that this sample includes is the creation in the 80s of the group Memphis, inspired by a song by Bob Dylan.
“It gives rise to a group of friends that creates a movement that will revolutionize design, and in which the designer is at the center of the game.” It is a reaction to functionalism, the rationalism of modernism and emerging postmodernism.
According to the curator, in the exhibition “there are pieces never presented before, which are exceptional and incunabula in Sottsass’s thought.” And that they look like “small architectures, because he never dissociated architecture from design.” EFE
By Perviz Iqbal
