Ondoso Table, Bauhaus
Alessandro Mendini for Alchimia
year: 1980
material: lacquered wood, celluloid
measurements: w 120 x d 100 x h 32 cm
w 47.2 x d 39.4 x h 12.6 inches
handsigned “A. Mendini, 1980”
The Ondoso table is a meditation on movement and surface. Its name—derived from the Italian word for waves—describes both its form and visual rhythm. Mendini treats the table not as a neutral support but as an expressive plane animated by pattern and color.
The piece combines industrial production with painterly intervention, a hallmark of Mendini’s practice. The surface becomes a landscape, blurring distinctions between furniture and painting.
In everyday use, the table resists invisibility. It asserts itself as an emotional presence, reinforcing Mendini’s belief that design should enrich daily life through imagination rather than efficiency alone.
Sirio Vase
Ettore Sottsass for Memphis
year: 1982
material: colorful, clear, hand-blown glass, colorless surface layer
measurements: w 17 x d 12 x h 37 cm
w 6.7 x d 4.7 x h 14.6 inches
Named after the brightest star in the night sky, the Sirio vase radiates intensity and ambition. Its vertical, totemic form recalls ancient ritual objects while using unmistakably modern materials and finishes.
The vase resists functionality—flowers are almost an afterthought. Instead, it operates as a symbolic object, positioned between sculpture, architecture, and design.
Through Sirio, Sottsass elevates the everyday vessel into a cosmic marker, asserting that domestic objects can carry myth, emotion, and narrative power.
Looking Koto Ku Buildings from Sumida River
Bruno Gregori for Alchimia
year: 1986
material: tempera
measurements: w 63.5 x h 64.5 cm
w 25 x h 25.4 inches
This tempera work reflects Alchimia’s fascination with cultural displacement and reinterpretation. Gregori’s view of Tokyo’s Kōtō-ku from the Sumida River is not a documentary cityscape, but a filtered, poetic vision shaped by distance and imagination.
Flattened perspectives, simplified forms, and muted tonal harmonies suggest memory rather than direct observation. The use of tempera reinforces a sense of intimacy and craft, countering the technological imagery often associated with Japan.
The work transforms the everyday urban view into a contemplative image—one that collapses geography, emotion, and design into a single visual moment.
Poltrona di Proust, Bauhaus
Alessandro Mendini for Alchimia
year: 1979
material: wood, handpainted upholstery
measurements: w 112 x d 90 x h 118 cm
w 44.1 x d 35.4 x h 46.5 inches
signed 1983, certificate by a. mendini
The Poltrona di Proust is one of the most iconic objects of late-20th-century design, and a manifesto for Alessandro Mendini’s radical approach to authorship and memory. Mendini began with a familiar Baroque armchair—a symbol of bourgeois taste and historical authority—and transformed it through a hand-painted surface inspired by pointillist painting, referencing Paul Signac rather than Marcel Proust directly. The title suggests memory, time, and subjective perception rather than literary illustration.
What makes the piece revolutionary is not its form, but its treatment. The chair is deliberately overloaded with cultural references: historic furniture, modernist painting, craft labor, and irony coexist without hierarchy. Each version is painted by hand, emphasizing slowness and imperfection in opposition to industrial design logic.
Here, the everyday act of sitting becomes a reflective experience. The chair does not serve function quietly—it demands attention, turning furniture into narrative object and design into emotional archaeology.
Tigris Vase
Ettore Sottsass for Memphis
year: 1983
material: porcelain
measurements: ø 19 x h 39 cm
ø 7.5 x h 15.4 inches
The Tigris vase is a classic Memphis object: stacked geometric volumes, laminated surfaces, and bold, clashing colors. Named after the river, it evokes flow and stratification, yet its form remains proudly artificial and constructed.
Sottsass intentionally avoids traditional notions of harmony. Instead, he embraces visual tension, turning the vase into an architectural composition rather than a decorative accessory.
The everyday vase—typically passive and ornamental—becomes an assertive symbol of postmodern freedom, challenging taste, seriousness, and the idea of “timeless” design.
Carabo Chair
Ettore Sottsass for Zanotta Edizioni
year: 1989
material: wood, laminate, fabric
measurements: w 47 x d 51 x h 85 cm
w 18.5 x d 20.1 x h 33.5 inches
handsigned e. sottsass
The Carabo Chair predates Memphis but already contains Sottsass’s rebellious DNA. Named after a beetle (Carabus), the chair’s angular, folded geometry rejects ergonomic conventions and modernist neutrality. Its lacquered surfaces and bold color blocks feel closer to sculpture or architecture than seating.
Technically, the chair uses plywood and industrial finishes, but its true innovation lies in its symbolic stance. Sottsass treats furniture as an expressive language, not a solution to a problem. Sitting becomes secondary to the chair’s role as a visual and cultural statement.
The Carabo anticipates the 1980s by asserting that design can be emotional, strange, even uncomfortable—and still meaningful. It transforms the everyday chair into a totem of resistance against functional dogma.
Città Fluida
Massimo Iosa Ghini
year: 1991
material: acrylic on canvas
measurements: w 120 x h 180 cm
w 47.2 x h 70.9 inches
handsigned
Città Fluida embodies the futurist spirit of Bolognese radical design and the visual energy of the postmodern metropolis. Iosa Ghini imagines the city not as a fixed structure, but as a flowing system of speed, light, and movement—an urban organism shaped by media, technology, and desire.
The painting uses dynamic lines, airbrushed gradients, and layered perspectives borrowed from comics, advertising, and science fiction. Architecture melts into motion; buildings bend, stretch, and pulse.
Here, the everyday experience of the city is reimagined as spectacle. Città Fluida reflects the 1980s belief that design, art, and pop culture could merge into a single visual language—one that celebrated excess, velocity, and imagination over order.
Rosa, giallo e bianco Side Table, Bharata
Ettore Sottsass for Design Gallery
year: 1988
material: laquered wood
measurements: w 40 x d 40 x h 40 cm
w 15.7 x d 15.7 x h 15.7 inches
This side table exemplifies Sottsass’s mastery of color as emotional language. Pink, yellow, and white are arranged not for balance but for impact, producing a joyful yet unsettling presence.
Constructed from industrial materials and laminate, the table embraces artificiality. Its form is simple, almost primitive, allowing color to carry meaning.
The piece transforms an everyday domestic object into a chromatic event, reinforcing the idea that furniture can communicate mood, identity, and cultural attitude.
Farfalle
Carla Ceccariglia for Alchimia
year: 1986
material: tempera
measurements: w 81 x h 59.8 cm
w 31.9 x h 23.5 inches
Farfalle (Butterflies) exemplifies Alchimia’s poetic and symbolic approach to surface decoration. Using tempera—a traditional, fragile medium—Ceccariglia creates a delicate yet emotionally charged image where butterflies appear as motifs of transformation, lightness, and ephemerality.
Within Alchimia’s philosophy, decoration is not superficial but conceptual. The butterflies act as metaphors for metamorphosis, echoing the group’s aim to liberate design from strict function and permanence.
The everyday object or surface becomes a canvas for storytelling, where painting and design merge. Farfalle reminds us that fragility and ornament can carry intellectual weight.