Penrose Fruit Bowl
The British designer George Sowden moved to Milan in 1970. In 1981, together with Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, he co-founded Memphis Milano. The design collaborative revolutionized design with its avant-garde, playful, pastiche of unconventional forms in furniture and objects featuring unusual and new materials. This fruit bowl’s vivid colors, interplay of patterned and solid surfaces, and incorporated stairways are typical of Memphis design. Like many Memphis Milano designs, the bowl is open to interpretation: it may be read variously as an ancient pyramid, a robotic device, the sun and its rays, or a reflecting pool.
Artwork Details
- Title: Penrose Fruit Bowl
- Designer: George Sowden (British, 1942)
- Manufacturer: Memphis Milano
- Date: 1983
- Medium: Metal
- Dimensions: 6 1/4 × 15 5/8 × 15 5/8 in. (15.9 × 39.7 × 39.7 cm)
- Classification: Silver
- Credit Line: Gift of Jacqueline Loewe Fowler, 2020
- Object Number: 2021.54.49
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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