Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Omaggio 3
Ettore Sottsass Italian, born Austria
Not on view
De Stijl’s optimistic belief that art, architecture, and design could fundamentally improve the built environment and, by extension, the way we live resonated with Sottsass, drawing him toward the avant-garde movement’s aesthetic language. Rather than simply transpose its elementary rectilinear, planar forms and palette of primary colors, Sottsass reinterprets De Stijl for contemporary times. In the series of nine cabinets he designed in homage to Mondrian, Sottsass extrapolates the master’s compositions into an arrangement of rectangular Lego-like volumes, an architectural massing rendered in a CMYK palette of synthetic Day-Glo magenta pink, chroma green, acid yellow, and key black. The function is open-ended, offering the user several facades of drawers and cabinetry to organize and contain all the chaotic ephemera of daily life.
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