The Château de Montsoreau – Musum of contemporary art dedicates an exhibition to Ettore Sottsass, a radical artist, designer, architect, ceramist, draftsman, photographer, who willingly breaks the bourgeois codes linked to the object.
Three times winner of the prestigious Compasso d’Oro, Sottsass is one of the major players of the groups, Antidesign (1966), Global Tools (1973), Alchimia (1976), Memphis (1981) and creates the Studio Sottsass Associati (1982).
His works are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, MoMA, Metropolitan Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum.
« Design is not about shaping a more or less stupid product for a more or less luxurious industry. For me design is a way of debating life. » (Ettore Sottsass)
Between revolution and emancipation
In his works, Ettore Sottsass takes a look at the world that reflects a new relationship between man and object. Considering that the object influences more or less directly the one who owns it, he creates furniture that is no longer defined only by its function but by its ability to create an imagination. He wants to « bring culture and free individual creativity together ».
With the series Foto dal Finestrino published every month in Domus magazine, Sottsass, a sharp observer, questions himself about the world around him and questions it. This poetry of the world, palpable in the object, will become the marker of a claiming thought and an era.
Icon creator
The objects created by Sottsass are representative of a changing society, a liberation from codes and conformity.
Inspired by Pop Art, the Valentine typewriter, manufactured by the firm Olivetti, is a revolution in its own right. Red as a lipstick, light as a handbag, sexy even in its shapes, it dares to reveal its mechanism and finally tells the story of the society of the late 60s.
Brigitte Bardot appears with her Valentine in hand in the film Les femmes de Jean Aurel (1969), David Bowie composes his planetary hit Let’s Dance on his brilliant keys and in Orange Mécanique, Stanley Kubrick places one in Malcolm MacDowell’s room. The furniture created by the Memphis group also represents a break with bourgeois ideas, through its new associations of synthetic materials such as Abet Laminati’s laminate with luxurious materials such as lacquer or gilded wood.
Designer of the world
Voluntarily not retrospective, the exhibition proposed by the Château de Montsoreau retraces this conception of design as a concrete materialization of a philosophy of life, free and uncomplicated.
In collaboration with the Museo Alessi, Kartell, Abet Laminati, galerie XXO and Akmé, the exhibition looks back at the founding experience in the electronics company Olivetti, the exuberance of Memphis and the questioning of the language of architecture in the 1970s.