Mendini's Shining Gold

The iconic architect and designer recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of his collaboration with the mosaic manufacturer with an exhibition at Milan’s Triennale - Salone del Mobile: Alessandro Mendini & Bisazza

Architect, artist, designer, writer and theoretician Alessandro Mendini is deemed a design icon not only in his native Italy, but all over the world. He opened with his brother the Milan-based Atelier Mendini, a studio focused on creating objects, furniture, paintings, installations and architecture. Mendini collaborated throughout his life with different design companies, among them Alessi, Philips, Cartier, Swatch, Hermès, Venini, and Zanotta.

The pieces showcased at the Triennale exhibition display a sort of “Gulliver syndrome” that prompted Mendini to play with proportions, creating dimensional paradoxes: a jacket, a shoe, a glove and a classic Borsalino hat - elements borrowed from a man’s wardrobe – were decorated with hand-cut 24-karat gold leaf mosaics and magnified, turned into monumental pieces of furniture via an alchemical process; a church preserving inside the sculpture “Visage Archaïque” and wearing a gold Cartier necklace, was instead shrunk, while a video installation focused on the three-metre high version of the 1978 “Proust Armchair” covered in colourful tesserae that evoked the style of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac’s pointillisme paintings.

The designer recently presented at Milan’s Triennale an exhibition celebrating his 30th anniversary with Bisazza, a leading Italian manufacturer of tesserae for mosaics. Mendini used Bisazza mosaics for the first time in 1989 in one of his works entitled “Paradise Tower in Hiroshima”. Up until then mosaics were mainly employed for mosques and swimming pools, but Mendini turned this traditional material into a modern feature, using it for interior design projects.

via dazed