Enzo Mari (Italy 1932)
Enzo Mari is one of the most thoughtful and intellectually provocative Italian designers of the late 20th century. He is a writer, teacher, artist and designer of products, furniture and puzzle games. He started his activity with studies on visual perception and then focused his attention on games for children, graphics, design and architecture: different directions sharing a common idea that is the reflection on the meaning of shape and project. Ih 1963 he founded the Nuova Tendenza group of artists in Milan. Yet he was equally productive as a designer. In 1962, he began to work with Danese´... Read more Enzo Mari is one of the most thoughtful and intellectually provocative Italian designers of the late 20th century. He is a writer, teacher, artist and designer of products, furniture and puzzle games. He started his activity with studies on visual perception and then focused his attention on games for children, graphics, design and architecture: different directions sharing a common idea that is the reflection on the meaning of shape and project. Ih 1963 he founded the Nuova Tendenza group of artists in Milan. Yet he was equally productive as a designer. In 1962, he began to work with Danese´s signature material -plastic in a six year-long project to develop a hat stand, umbrella stand and waste bin. By the end of the 1960s, Mari could manipulate plastic so skilfully that, in his hands, it attained a sculptural fluidity. One of his most accomplished plastic products was Vase Model 3087 which Danese put into production in 1969. It was a reversible vase with a central cone to ensure that it functioned equally efficiently as a vase whether standing on its top or bottom. While continuing his work as a product designer, he also turned to furniture. In 1971, Mari unveiled the Sof Sof chair for Driade in which a single removable cushion upholstered a simple welded rod frame. During the 1980s when Italian design was dominated by the flamboyant forms and kitsch colours of the Memphis group?s exuberant take on post-modernism, Mari and his thoughtful rationalism seemed dated. His designs of that decade, such as the perfectly plain Tonietta cast aluminium framed chair for Zanotta unveiled in 1985, looked like a carefully calculated antidote to Memphis. Yet the same rigour and restraint revived interest in Enzo Mari`s work during the 1990s, when once again he was acknowledged as an important influence on contemporary design. By the early 2000s, as Mari entered his seventies, he won new commissions from Muji, the Japanese home store with a rationalist aesthetic remarkably empathetic to his own, and Gebrüder Thonet in Vienna, which invited him to create a contemporary version of its famous late 19th century bentwood chairs. Meanwhile Danese, the company for which Enzo Mari had begun working less than a year after graduating from the Academia di Brera, produced a limited edition of the first fruit of their collaboration his 16 Animali wooden puzzle.
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