Designer, architect, historian and theorist, awarded three Compasso d’Oro – of which one for his career – Andrea Branzi was a multifaceted and radical figure, author of a design thought that crossed applied arts, domestic and urban space with unprecedented sensitivity: a “poetic living” and interdisciplinary that the exhibition Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed, a year after his deathfocuses starting from the gold and silver jewelery series, Silver & Goldand objects in silver and birch wood, Silver & Woodmade in Belgium in the second half of the 1990s and collected in a retrospective exhibition at the Design Museum in Ghent in 1998.
The exhibition, on display until February 16th 10 Corso Comois divided into a path that aligns and places works, documents, drawings and photographs in dialogue. The exhibition, conceived as a continuous flow, composes a landscape of objects extended over a period of time that from the middle of the eighties comes to the latest creations of 2023. The heart of the exhibition are the jewelsgold and silver garlands, crowns and necklaces that “framing the human body in a landscape, mark its aura with leaves and natural elements, to highlight that mystical dimension of ornament in its primordial meaning, as a means that brings the man to the divine.”, as the curator Alessio de’ Navasques writes in the text that accompanies the exhibition.
The exhibition reconstructs the special relationship with Belgium among the first nineties and half of Two-thousandwith private and institutional commissions, through the hybrid objects – boxes and sculptural lamps – of the series Wood & Stonesin which the use of wood and stone seems to want to heal the distances between science e natureto the silver ones in the series Silver & Wood in which the elements of the traditional tea service are translated into linear forms with intersections of branches and plant fragments. It is still the purity of the silver weaving of baskets and containers that evokes archetypal and symbolic forms, with references to Shaker culture. Of the monumental installation of Large Glass made in Thinking in 1999 the history was traced through documentation and prototypes.
To highlight the lines of continuity of the designer’s incessant and all-encompassing reflection on the tension between modernity and nature, original examples of the famous series of seats are on display Pets – conceived in the mid-eighties – in dialogue with the more recent Stones 2A – already part of the exhibition Trees & Stones alla galleria Friedman Benda in New York in 2012, where trunks and stones as elements of a pre-human archeology are related to industrial materials – and Germinal Bench in 2022, in which the use of bamboo canes, compared by Branzi to a forest of organ pipes, reverberates the concept of nature as a form of infinite architecture.
dove: 10 · Course · Como Galleria, Milan
when: until February 16th
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