Milan, an exhibition at the Triennale on the relationship between Ettore Sottsass and photography

An exhibition dedicated to the relationship between the great architect and designer Ettore Sottsass (Innsbruck, 1917 - Milan, 2007) and photography. It is titled Ettore Sottsass. Design Metaphors and is scheduled from September 29, 2023 to April 21, 2024 at the Milan Triennale, organized in collaboration with Studio Sottsass and under the artistic direction of Christoph Radl. This is the fourth project in the exhibition cycle dedicated to Sottsass, following Structure and Color (Dec. 3, 2021 - June 12, 2022), The Calculus (July 15, 2022 - Jan. 8, 2023) and The Word (Jan. 20 - Sept. 17, 2023).

Like the three previous exhibitions, Metaphors is also set up inside Sala Sottsass, where from January 2021 the permanent installation of Casa Lana will be located: the interior of a private residence designed by Sottsass around the mid-1960s in Milan, faithfully reconstructed at the Triennale and accessible to the public thanks to a donation from Barbara Radice Sottsass.

Ettore Sottsass. Design Met aphors brings together a series of photographs, grouped under the name of “Metaphors,” taken by Ettore Sottsass between 1972 and 1978; the first three groups of photographs-Drawings for the Destinies of theman, Drawings for the Rights of Man, and Drawings for the Needs of Animals-were exhibited in 1976 in Man Transforms, the opening group exhibition of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, curated by Hans Hollein with Liza Taylor. The Engaged and Decorations series were taken after 1976 and after the Cooper Hewitt exhibition, during trips to America, Greece, the Middle East and Italy. A series of drawings made during the same years are also exhibited at the Triennial.

The years between 1972 and 1976 come towards the end of Radical Architecture; for Sottsass that was a period of great critical reflection, in which he had almost stopped designing, in which he thought, drew, wrote, and divided his time between his Milan studio and various Spanish wanderings including Barcelona, Madrid, Almeria, Granada, but especially the stone deserts southeast of the Ebro and the wild valleys of the Pyrenees. In his travels he builds and photographs: he intervenes in the landscape initially with a few signs, making temporary structures with materials such as string, bits of wood, stakes, ribbons, cardboard boxes, leaves, branches, stones, strips of cloth. Then gradually the landscape also gives way to the entrance of man, with his questions.

Also featured in the exhibition are the series of drawings Constructions, made in the same years as his travels; these are studies of architectural language, reflections on the environment, notes on anthropology, and analyses of the meaning of design that, while often starting from the study of a real object, are able to lead the viewer to broader meditations, which often go beyond the mere act of ideating, to enter symbolic worlds and reflection.

“Ettore Sottsass,” says Stefano Boeri, president of Triennale Milano, “was a great romantic hero. What distinguishes him from a crowd of artists and intellectuals who nevertheless built the conditions of contemporary thought and criticism, who advanced knowledge and beauty in the world, is an uncanny balance between depth and lightness. Sottsass’s thought, writings, drawings, and photographs often know how to stir that inscrutable feeling of being in the world - of the ultimate meaning of our lives, today, on this planet - that we know instead normally to bury under a thick blanket of emotions, memories, and sensations fueled by everyday life.”

“The use of photography, juxtaposed with drawing,” emphasizes Marco Sammicheli, director of the Museum of Italian Design at Triennale Milano, “recounts another mode of expression of Ettore Sottsass, who through the use of symbols, experiences and overlapping languages, succeeds in taking the viewer to places where he can understand, discover, imagine and ask new questions.”

Photo: Gianluca Di Ioia

Milan, an exhibition at the Triennale on the relationship between Ettore Sottsass and photography

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