Events / Exhibitions

Exhibition

Ettore Sottsass, the magical object

October 19TH 2021 - January 3TH 2022

Place Georges-Pompidou 75004 Paris

Ettore Sottsass Jr. (Innsbruck, Austria, 1917-Milan, ltaly, 2007) was a designer, architect and writer and a precursor throughout his life. He was opposed to rationalism and advocated an emotional experience of abjects.

This exhibition highlights the concept of «magical design» in the oeuvre of Sottsass, for whom the ritual and symbolic presence of abjects was experienced as a punctuation of a cosmic whole.
The exhibition begins with his first works in the 1940s which were informed by modern artistic and architectural avant-gardes.

ln the 1960s-1970s, his ceramics, endowed with a «therapeutic function», were veritable sensory environments between design and architecture. ln 1981, Sottsass founded the Memphis movement whose iconoclastie approach promoted the sensorial dimension of abjects. Photography was an instrument for capturing the real and a melting pot for the “magical thinking 11 of his production.

Ettore Sottsass saw design as a way of redefining architecture and forging new connections between people and abjects: 11 have always believed that design begins where rational processes end and those of magic start.