The Galleria Civica d’Arte
Moderna and the Contemporanea di Torino and the Castello di
Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
are devoting a great exhibition to one of the most
outstanding figures of Italian culture, Carlo Mollino. The
exhibition will
run until 7th January.
Architect
Carlo Mollino was born in 1905 and trained at
the Polytechnic in Turin, where he graduated in 1931. A
skier, driver, and aeroplane pilot, Mollino soon found
himself well inserted in the lively cultural environment in
Turin, between the two wars, where he made friends with
personalities in the world of culture and art. Together with
his meticulous technical training, which paid particular
attention to functional aspects, in his projects there was
always crosstalk between elements of modernity and a
considerable sensibility for the past. From 1933 to 1973,
the year when he suddenly died, he made a total of only
about ten architectural works. Particularly noteworthy among
his masterpieces was the Società Ippica Torinese (1937 –
1940) in which rationalism intensifies and extols
metaphysical elements, the building for the Slittovia di
Lago Nero (1946-1947) in which the traditional Alpine
ski-lift building was rethought in original form, and the
new Teatro Regio in Turin (1965-1973), which interior
Mollino himself referred to as "a shape somewhere between an
egg and a half-open oyster".
Equally important was his
work as an interior designer. His Casa Miller (1936) and
Casa Devalle (1939-1940) reveal a surrealist taste. In 1949
he started teaching at the Faculty of Architecture at the
Polytechnic of Turin, and the following year he was invited
to take part in a travelling exhibition in eleven American
museums. Mollino never worked for large industry. Most of
his furniture were carried out as one-off items. The most
prolific years of his career came to a sudden end in
December 1953, with the death of his father Eugenio. The
architect's activities were suspended in favour of his
passion for motoring and aerobatics.
In 1954 he designed Nube
d'Argento, an exhibition for the national gas company,
and the following year he created, amongst others, a racing
car, the Bisiluro, which took part that year in the
24 Hours at Le Mans. Later he created two record cars
remained in a model state. In 1960 Mollino returned to his
work as an architect and started redesigning the apartment
in Via Napione in Turin, which is now Museo Casa Mollino.
Carlo Mollino left several essays and books, ranging from
narrative to architecture, and on to skiing technique and
photographic criticism, including Il Messaggio dalla
Camera Oscura, which was written in 1943 and published
in 1949.
GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte
Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino
The GAM exhibition is giving
a broad vision of Mollino's rich life, revealing his spirit,
his poetics, the subjects and qualities of the artist's
works through the display of rare pieces of furniture.
|
|
The
Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna and the Contemporanea
di Torino and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte
Contemporanea
are devoting a great exhibition to one of the most
outstanding figures of Italian culture, Carlo
Mollino. |
|
|
On the third floor of the Castello di Rivoli there
is an exhibition that illustrates Mollino's great
passion for photography, which was an extremely
important aspect of his work. The display of his
photographs includes material never shown before
from international collections and from Museo Casa
Mollino. |
|
|
|
The
Slittovia di Lago Nero (1946-1947) saw architect
Carlo Mollino rethinking in original form the
traditional Alpine ski-lift building. |
|
|
The
Casa Orengo, is a "vertebra" table created
by Carlo Mollino and now owned by the
Brooklyn Museum of New York and which has been
granted on loan to the exhibition for the first time
since 1950. |
|
They are authentic, original and unique, and include the
table for Casa Orengo, a "vertebra" table owned by the
Brooklyn Museum of New York and granted on loan for the
first time since 1950, and a stunning desk from the Centre
Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition is showing works from
private collections in America and Europe, including the
most complete of all, which is that of gallery owner Bruno
Bischofberger.
The of University of Miami - School of Architecture has
produced, during a special course, three models of specific
buildings and interiors that will be shown with a selection
of famous drawings by the architect, some of them made with
both hands. Some of the most interesting works on show at
GAM are record car 5,5 metres long built on a real scale by
Gruppo Stola of Cascine Vica, the Bisiluro car, from
the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci
in Milan, and the reconstruction of a bedroom of the
thirties, with walls lined with capitonné silk.
Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
On the third floor of the
Castello di Rivoli there is an exhibition that illustrates
Mollino's great passion for photography, which was an
extremely important aspect of his work. The display of his
photographs includes material never shown before from
international collections and from Museo Casa Mollino. A
broad selection of works - over two hundred in number -
together with emblematic items will make it possible to
bring together various moments of what was always an
intimate part of Mollino's relationship with his own
creativity.
The photographic works of the
Turin-born architect can be divided into five main sections:
photomontages of architectural items and photographs of
interiors for specialised journals, black and white
photography of a surrealist nature from around the 1940s,
ski photography - which was mainly made for his volume on
skiing techniques - photography from the second half of the
1960s and, lastly, his Polaroid shots of female portraits
that he made from the 1960s up to the time of his death.
The exhibition is curated by
Museo Casa Mollino di Torino, founded by Fulvio and
Napoleone Ferrai, which has been devoted since 1985 to
promoting the figure of Carlo Mollino in Italy and abroad.
Fulvio Ferrari curated the first exhibition of the
architect's works in Italy in 1985, and in 1994 the first
photographic retrospective of Mollino in the United States.
He’ s the author of several monographic publications on the
work of Mollino published in Europe, the US and Japan. The
exhibition is complete with a comprehensive catalogue, with
colour illustrations, critical essays by the curators, Paolo
Portoghesi, Mario Federico Roggero, Mario Verdun, Donatella
Biffignandi, Lisa Ponti, and other authoritative scholars on
the work of Carlo Mollino.
|
|
|