"I've always thought that design starts where rational processes end and magic begins." - Ettore Sottsass
This exhibition catalog from a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris begins with Ettore Sottsass' early creative years, nourished by artistic and architectural avant-garde, as well as by literature and folk art. In the 1960s, Sottsass made a significant production of ceramics that explore a dimension that is both ritual and sensory. With this body of work and later in the 1970s, Sottsass engaged in radical experimentation, wandering somewhere between design and architecture, from the Superbox (1966) to the nomadic architecture of the Furniture containers, carried out in 1972 for MoMA in New York.
Later in the 1980s, the artist founded the now notorious Memphis. Through its liberating approach to design, Memphis advocates a different approach to design in favor of an emotional and sensory dimension of objects.
Throughout his life, Sottsass never stopped taking pictures. This exhibition places photography at the very heart of Sottsass's conceptual research through several hundred photographs (exhibited for the first time) from the collections of the Center Pompidou. The exhibition brings together a unique set of major historical pieces, and creates a dialogue between design objects and Sottsass's graphic research: drawings, installations, photographs and films brought together from the collections of the Center Pompidou itself and loaned from public and private collections.