Tavolo da pranzo "Palafitte" di Cleto Munari
Edizione limitata di 99 pz - 2008
Edizione limitata di 99 pz - 2008
Libreria double face "San Francisco" in legno laccato di Alessandro Mendini
Edizione limitata di 9 pz - 2008
Edizione limitata di 9 pz - 2008
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Cleto Munari Design Associates,
founded in 1972, has always had as its primary objective, the research
of image, form and style through the study and avant-garde of design.
The meeting of Cleto Munari with Carlo Scarpa ignited the search and
experimentation in the field of the artisan handicraft using gold and
silver, arriving at the creation, in 1978, of the well-known cutlery
line.
By the end of the seventies an exclusive collection of silver pieces was created, designed by noted architects and designers and produced in limited numbers, today visible in art galleries and museums all over the world. Among these authors: Mario Bellini, Mario Botta , Michele De Lucchi, Ettore Sottsass, Carlo Scarpa, Vico Magistretti, Paolo Portoghesi , Angelo Mangiarotti, Roberto Sambonet, Marco Zanuso, Hans Hollein.
By the end of the seventies an exclusive collection of silver pieces was created, designed by noted architects and designers and produced in limited numbers, today visible in art galleries and museums all over the world. Among these authors: Mario Bellini, Mario Botta , Michele De Lucchi, Ettore Sottsass, Carlo Scarpa, Vico Magistretti, Paolo Portoghesi , Angelo Mangiarotti, Roberto Sambonet, Marco Zanuso, Hans Hollein.
In 1980 the creation of a collection of jewelry
in gold and precious stones began which was present for ten years in
international museums and art galleries, giving life to a traveling show
which concluded at the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome on the occasion of
the first opening to the public of that exposition space.
In 1984, Cleto Munari Design Associates launched an innovative collection of watches designed by M. Graves, A. Isozaki, H. Hollein and E. Sottsass , today part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York.
In 1990, Alessandro Munari, engineer, but with a
lifetime passion for design, inaugurated headquarters in the province
of Padua for the production of objects in silver for daily use,
distributed in Italy in over 400 jewelry and silver shops. This
collection, constantly updated with novelty products, today is made up
of a wide range of notable articles.
In 2002, keen interest in exploring new
horizons in the design world moved Cleto Munari Design Associates to
invest in a glasswork factory in Murano Venice, the beginning of an
innovative experience in the area of glass-making. Once again
international designers and artists were invited to improvise with this
magical material.
In 2004, the creation of a unique collection of five fountain pens designed by A. Mendini, O. Tusquets, A. Siza, Toyo Ito e Cleto Munari , each
one dedicated to five Nobel Prize winners in Literature, adding yet
another dimension to the already varied world of the company.
At the end of this 30-year road, Cleto Munari
Design Associates has most recently concentrated in the creation of a
furniture line presented in 2008, named the "Alessandro Mendini and
Cleto Munari 2008 Collection".
The colourful varnished wood furniture,
sculptures in silver and carpets in wool, already presented in numerous
international exhibitions, are today in a show dedicated to the
architect, Alessandro Mendini, at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome.
Complementing this new project will be the Table-Sculpture Collection produced in a series of nine examples and designed by Cleto Munari, Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia, Mario Botta , Alessandro Mendini, Lawrence Ferlinghetti e Mark Strand.
Complementing this new project will be the Table-Sculpture Collection produced in a series of nine examples and designed by Cleto Munari, Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia, Mario Botta , Alessandro Mendini, Lawrence Ferlinghetti e Mark Strand.
Among other future projects: the personal collection of Sandro Chia for the Biennale Exhibition in Venice 2009; a furniture line created in collaboration with such architects as Marcello Morandini e Giorgio Cattaneo.
Because Munari has, at the same time, the
intuition and the ample eclectisism of the big collectors, but his
“beautiful things” are not sought after in the shop windows or in some
dusty warehouse but rather in the mind of his designer friends,
explaining to them his ideas and intuitions and waiting patiently as
they take form, first on drawing paper and then through a process
similar to the distilling of liquor and consisting of comparing and
correcting proto-types on the base of not only visual experience but
tactile, weighty, and even acoustic in certain cases. Munari is
therefore an "author" even if the author is missing a watch and, the
manic cult of his own "personal style", is a "colloquial author" that
utilizes the creativity of others without sacrificing his own, and
reserves for himself, of the creation, two essential moments, even if
normally rarely considered, the initial program and the self-critical
journey that leads to the realization of the prototype.
The anomalous position of Munari, with
respect to the alliance of producers of "Italian design", his
indifference for the orthodox theory of design, and his passion for hand
produced items, for the quality of the material and the perfection of
its refinement measures, has allowed him however to develop an important
cultural function, particularly in the last decade, for having both
offered Carlo Scarpa the opportunity of a long and passionate search on
the cutlery theme, in which the Venetian master gave the best of his
taste to everyday luxury, as well as having given space to others who
have explored the boundaries of orthodox modernism, and then decidedly
distanced, hypothesizing a possible autonomous development for the
“Italian Line”, released from the inhibitions of the operations of gute Form. Observed
in its complex, like a system closed of experiences, bound by a thread
that is both continuance and contradiction, the collection of objects
produced by Cleto Munari has a “liberal” intonation and pushes towards
the comparison of personality which in the newspaper columns and in the
public debates contrasts with the theoretical subjects of the modernism
and post modernism. A healthy confrontation because at the end of the
game, in certain cases it shortens the distances and makes one see the
dispute more clearly, and is more accessible to non-experts, if it is
based on, even in architecture, finished and tangible works, instead of
projects condemned to remain on paper or in words threatened by
ambiguity and inter-exchange.
A Master therefore in the field of "doing"
Munari style, with his comic smile, through the culture of architects
and of designers, enriching them with rare occasions of testing end
results, leaving behind himself small wonders which one day historians
will study as precocious and significant symptoms of more vast phenomena
which will also be part of , I hope, the future of our cities.
And the collectors, that are often ignored,
historians in action, creators of fashion and custodians of quality,
will find in the tilled and cultivated field of Munari the competence of
those who know old and new secrets of the earth, abundant fruits to
harvest and keep, overriding their choice and that already operated on,
proposing additional details aside from those suggested, other
consonances and contradictions, feeding a game which man has begun since
the dawn of civilization and which consists of pleasure, reflected in
the concreteness of an object, the difference of subjects, of the men
who created, accomplishing that daily miracle which allows us to know
ourselves again and again, the miracle of identity. Follow @OFFmagacine
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