In the anniversary sale "5 to 118" on September 18th, 2019, PIASA offers for sale one of the most emblematic pieces of Italian designer Alessandro Mendini, who died in February 2019.
The flavour of a tea-soaked madeleine and Sunday morning spent in Combray with his aunt Leonie, the badly squared pavers of the courtyard in front of the Duchess de Guermantes hotel and the uneven slabs of the baptistery of Saint-Marc during his stay in Venice or the sound of a spoon in a library and the repair of a train in open country. Innumerable, in the literary maze of A la recherche du temps perdu, involuntary memories make palpable the interweaving of ancient times in the present of the narrator.
As Marcel Proust’s book, the armchair realized by Alessandro Mendini brings together distant periods. This piece of furniture, as a piece of art or as a manifesto, is a speech, better, a statement on the influence, harmful to him, of massive industrialization on contemporary design.
Alessandro Mendini (1931-2019) Poltrona di Proust - Pièce unique
Estimate : 20000 / 30000 €
The Poltrona di Proust was realized in 1978 for the Palazzo of Diamanti in Ferrara. Its finely carved wooden structure combined with the generosity of its excessively baroque curves refer to the Regency style while the hand-painted wood and the multicolour fabric explicitly evoke Modern Art and the pointillist movement.
Head of the Radical design movement, Alessandro Mendini collaborated with Studio Alchimia in the mid-1970s and met many Italian designers, including Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi and Michele De Lucchi. In parallel with his creative work, he directs several architectural journals including Modo and Domus from 1979 to 1985.
Adapting the spirit and the chromaticism of this unique piece, the Galerie kreo publishes in 2007, eight copies of a prototype of the "Proust" armchairs, realized in mosaic Bisazza and fiberglass.
Alessandro Mendini (1931-2019) Proust - Prototype 2
Estimate : 25000 / 35000 €
