Search the collections

Fullscreen

James Nares: <em>Street</em>

James Nares: Street
(00:02:17) 18499 views

The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi

The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi
(00:01:17) 2697 views

Related Content

"The Structures Tremble"

Side Chair

Side Chair "Synthesis 45" Office Furniture System

"Asteroid" Lamp

"Pausania" Lamp

"Miss, Don't You Like Caviar?" Armchair

Browse current and upcoming exhibitions and events.

Exhibitions:

Events:

Events:

"Carlton" Room Divider

Ettore Sottsass  (Italian (born Austria), Innsbruck 1917–2007 Milan)

Manufacturer:
Memphis Milano
Date:
1981
Medium:
Wood, plastic laminate
Dimensions:
H. 76-3/4, W. 74-3/4, D. 15-3/4 in. (194.9 x 189.9 x 40 cm)
Classification:
Furniture
Credit Line:
John C. Waddell Collection, Gift of John C. Waddell, 1997
Accession Number:
1997.460.1a–d

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 909

  • Description

    Sottsass is not only one of the most influential designers of the latter half of the twentieth century but also one of the most paradoxical. While he has had a successful career producing industrial designs for the mainstream corporation Olivetti, for everything from typewriters and computers to office landscapes, he has also been iconoclastic as well, creating strikingly unconventional consumer-oriented objects that challenge the bourgeois audience at which they are aimed to reassess its assumptions of the limits of "good taste."


    Between 1981 and 1988 Sottsass and a small international group of like-minded designers who called themselves Memphis, created nonconformist furniture. The totemic "Carleton" room divider is an outstanding example of his Memphis designs. Although intended for a luxury market and of fine workmanship, it is made of cheap plastic laminates rather than fine woods. The vivid colors and seemingly random interplay of solids and voids suggest avant-garde painting and sculpture. Yet, typical of Sottsass, underlying the surface brilliance is an entirely logical structural system, of real and implied equilateral triangles.

  • Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

    Signature: [label right side at bottom]: MEMPHIS /MILANO /ETTORE SOTTSASS /1981 /MADE IN ITALY

  • Exhibition History

    Giampiero Bosoni, editor, ¦Il Modo Italiano: Italian Design and Avant-garde in the 20th Century¦, Musée des Beaux-arts de Montréal, Montreal, May 4–August 27, 2006; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, October 21, 2006–January 7, 2007; Museo d'Arte Moderne e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy, March 3–June 3, 2007, ill. p. 295, checklist p. 371, no. 325.

  • See also
    Who
    What
    Where
    When
    In the Museum
    Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
210007205

Close