Hasta La Ideas

“[Alessandro] Mendini provides a spine through the whole show. That chair is a really fantastic thing. This is him working with Studio Alchimia, which is just before Memphis starts—it’s a more avant-garde, nihilistic design collective than Memphis, but provides some of the inspiration for it. And that particular chair is typical of his practice at this time. Mendini called it “redesign”—he was making new objects from quoted material from lots of different sources. It’s a wood-frame chair with white upholstery, and Mendini projected a slide onto it and painted it to match. The title is a reference to this idea of memory—Baroque furniture, pointillism. It’s very layered and quite witty but not particularly functional.”

–Glenn Adamson, co-curator of “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990” at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, on Alessandro Mendini’s “Proust” chair (pictured) in an interview-cum-exhibition tour with Marc Kristal on Dwell.com

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