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Piero Fornasetti

One hundred years of practical madness

by Barnaba Fornasetti

 

I also consider myself the inventor of the tray, because at some point in our civilisation we no longer knew how to hand out a glass,

a message, a poem. I was born into a family of the worst good taste and I consider

the worst good taste as the key to liberate the imagination. Piero Fornasetti

 

Multifaceted and unconventional, Piero Fornasetti had an extremely rich and complex personality. Painter, engraver and printer, designer, collector, stylist, refined craftsman, art gallery manager and exhibition promoter, his world was animated by the rigour of the project, of art and craftsmanship, but also by unbridled fantasy, surrealist invention, and poetry. Fornasetti created one of the largest visual libraries of designs and objects in the 20th century.  He designed and manufactured approximately 13.000 objects and decorations, real “memories of the future” like “open door to new possibilities”. His works took their origin from a cultivated eye that studied the roots of the classical past, as Gio Ponti, his mentor and friend well knew. Fornasetti’ s strong imagination along with an elegant and mystical sense of humour involving creatures, scenes of the natural universe, and human anatomy, are perfectly represented in this catalogue curated by his son, Barnaba Fornasetti.  It accompanies  the exhibition “One Hundred Years of Practical Madness” now running at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan.

 

Piero Fornasetti

One Hundred Years of Practical Madness

by Barnaba Fornasetti

Texts by Ginevra Quadrio Curzio, preface by Patrick Mauriès

Corraini Edizioni, Triennale Design Museum

21 x 26 cm, pp. 198, 34 euro

English/Italian ed.

on sale at 10 Corso Como Bookshop