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Never as in the "fabulous Eighties" have the contaminations between design, art, music, fashion and entertainment reached such strong expressions, and despite having been hated for their excesses, the '80s are more present than ever. From David Bowie to Grace Jones, the legendary pop icons of those years still inspire fashion, just as a good slice of contemporary design evokes the exaggerated shapes, the bright colors and the winding patterns of the furniture created by the Memphis Group, an Italian collective founded by Ettore Sottsass in 1981.
Excessive and extravagant, the objects designed by Memphis broke the mould: today, riding a trend prone to bold combinations between different materials, shades and fluo colors, they are back into fashion in the home thanks to their playful energy. Memphis was closely linked to another breaking movement, Alchimia, founded in the late '70s by Milanese architect Alessandro Mendini. To him, one long-lived father of the Made in Italy (born on August 16, 1931, he died at the age of 87 on February 18, 2019), the Groninger Museum in Groninger, the Netherlands, dedicates "Mondo Mendini", a great retrospective that opens on October 12 and will be on until May 5, 2020.
This commemoration coincides with the 25th anniversary of the opening of the museum, designed by Mendini himself; until shortly before his death, the designer selected for the exhibition numerous of his drawings, along with the works by the artists and designers he most loved. During his career as an architect, designer and publisher (he was the director of the magazines Casabella, Domus and Modo), Mendini has extensively collaborated with Memphis, hanging out with its great designers — from Ettore Sottsass to Andrea Branzi, from Nathalie du Pasquier to Matteo Thun —, building the foundations of postmodern design, which approached everyday objects with the aim of revolutionizing them: "I don't think of myself as a designer. I put together so many different activities, I'm a mess. My objects have a soul, and I try to express it," Mendini said of his work.
All his most iconic pieces are in the show, such as the famous Proust armchair (1978), an interpretation of a baroque seat decorated as a pointillist painting, the famous Kandissi sofa, the funniest objects he made for Alessi. In a riot of shapes and colors, art and design are mixed in a unique architectural context spanning several decades: on display are also the most recent and exuberant creations signed by Atelier Mendini, (the studio that Alessandro founded in 1989 in collaboration with his brother Francesco), examples of an '80s esprit revisited with modernity.
