PIASA’s sale of Italian Design on Thursday 17 March features works by such leading names as Gio Ponti, Pietro Chiesa, BBPR, Ignazio Gardella, Ico Parisi and Max Ingrand – alongs with a section devoted to star furniture-designer Pierluigi Ghianda.
Italian Design
With its plethora of high-quality companies, craftsmen, editors and designers, Northern Italy became the nerve-centre for Design during the second half of the 20th century. The auction retraces the history of Italian Design from this period through a selection of works by its most iconic figures.
Gio Ponti (1891-1979), the godfather of Italy’s post-war Design renaissance, is represented by an unusual Modernist desk in natural and lacquered wood, complete with magazine-rack (est. €55,000-75,000) – typical of the ingenious Ponti style in both its sharp-edged geometry, spatial economy and ingenious wall-unit. The desk was first made in plain wood before appearing in a coloured version three years later, at the celebrated Milan Triennale of 1957.
Piero Fornasetti (1913-88), subject of a major retrospective at the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2015, is a key name on the Italian artistic scene. His zany baroque world is represented here by two chairs that embody the whimsy and charm of Italian culture (€1500-2300 / €2000-3000).
The architect Claudio Salocchi (born 1939), a leading apostle of an all-embracing creative approach to interior design, is represented by a remarkable destructured bookcase in lacquered wood and Brazilian rosewood (est. €15,000-20,000). Salocchi’s work, with its fragmented forms that stretch out and extend in a centrifugal manner, exudes true expressive mastery.
