Made in Italy in 11 showcases in Milan for MuseoCity 2024

Friday, March 1, 2024 kicked off the eighth edition of Milano MuseoCity, a Milanese event promoted by the City of Milan in collaboration with the MuseoCity ETS Association that opens the doors of public and private museums, artists’ archives, house museums, art foundations and business museums that are not always accessible to the public. The event will end on March 5. The MuseoCity in a Showcase project constitutes one of MuseoCity’s special initiatives, designed to host artworks, archival materials and iconic pieces from the collections of eleven renowned companies in the Design and Fashion industry. The showcases become temporary museums that, for five days, attract the attention of passersby, transforming them into spectators and potential visitors to the city’s museums. Since their origin in the 19th century, department stores adopted an effective strategy to promote sales by displaying goods attractively behind windows along city streets. Among the pioneers was Le Bon Marché in Paris, which in 1875 opened an exhibition space for artists rejected by the Salon des Beaux-Arts, holding periodic exhibitions of painting and sculpture to attract potential buyers. Le Bon Marché annually invites artists and designers to create site-specific installations. Famous example is also the window display created in 1936 by Salvador Dali for the Bonwit Teller Department Store in New York in conjunction with the MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism: a business card with an invitation to explore the goods in the department store and visit the exhibition inside the New York museum. MuseoCity in Vetrina is an accessible, inclusive and widespread project across the territory: an invitation to interpret the theme “Worlds in Milan” according to their own identity, showcasing the value of businesses and corporate culture.

The eclecticism and international openness of this reality is emphasized by Alessi and Artemide brought the richness of different design languages to the showcase. Alessi’s showroom on Via Manzoni displays the production of eight authors; while Artemide transforms the Corso Monforte 19 space into an international stage, sharing the design unicum of Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, which also gave rise to Pipe, winner of the Compasso d’Oro. All-Italian projects by Cassina, Molteni&C and Poltrona Frau chronicle research and collaborations with key figures in the post-World War II design world. Cassina presents Maralunga, the revolutionary sofa designed by Magistretti in 1973, now also featured in the limited-edition Nuova Lancia Ypsilon campaign. Molteni&C’s showcases, on the other hand, are dedicated to Gio Ponti, with the shapes of the D.154.2 armchair and the D.555.1 coffee table, designed in the 1950s and reproposed by the company based on the original drawings preserved in the Gio Ponti Archives. Poltrona Frau, on the other hand, conceives its storefront as a sort of museum display, where the Poltrona Dezza in Redevance fabric, retrieved from Ponti’s archives, is displayed on a glossy white platform along with catalogs, historical documents and two miniatures, one mounted and the other disassembled. Kartell invited several international creative talents to freely interpret a product of the brand, present in the Kartell Museo collection, through short author’s shorts. Boffi|De Padova introduces the medium of photography, which dialogues with the design of the showroom’s interior spaces. Here Veronica Gaido addresses the theme of the body as the origin and end of everything, the instrument through which we know and experience. Another cross-disciplinary project is Lavazza’s THE HEALER by AART VERRIPS, photography and original costume designed and created for the June page of the Lavazza 2024 calendar. On display inside the store are photographs by Daniel Obasi, Thandiwe Muriu and Aart Verrips, all linked by the energy and vibrant colors of Africa.

Marazzi ’s marriage of art and design is evident, transforming the Green & Blue Room, a project of ACPV ARCHITECTS, into a unique Wunderkammer housing artist’s books, sculptures and works on loan from Casa Museo Spazio Tadini and the Fausta Squatriti Archive. Atlas Concorde, an expert in Made in Italy ceramic surfaces, presents in the showroom Incontri e progetti - Pastel Rebellion, a delicate pastel performance that expresses, through the Boost Color collection curated by Piero Lissoni, the union between creativity, production realities and institutions peculiar to Milan. Missoni draws inspiration from Slow Art to represent the principles of its lifestyle: colored threads slowly descend from the cylinders used to wind the warp yarn, transforming into zigzag knits through the artist’s loom, an iconic element of the brand.

“It is not the material that makes the art, but the artistic conception,” writes Alvar Gonzáles-Palacios, one of the most distinguished historians of the Decorative Arts of our time, in his omnibus work The Temple of Taste.

Made in Italy in 11 showcases in Milan for MuseoCity 2024

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