“For us, art in Milan had sold its soul to upholstery. No one cared about art…even though none of the designers’ lights would ever reach the spiritual intensity of a single neon by Flavin.” With this statement the art critic Tommaso Trini sums up the perceived rivalry between postwar Italian art and contemporary industrial design. Taking as a starting point the display of trendy inflatable couches, designer lights and sleek vacuum cleaners, this lecture highlights the work of well-known industrial designers such as Ettore Sottsass and Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, which will be considered alongside that of contemporary artists and filmmakers, including Pino Pascali and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Dr Flavia Frigeri is an art historian and ‘Chanel Curator for the Collection’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London. From 2016 to 2020 she was a Teaching Fellow in the History of Art Department UCL and continues to be a longstanding member of faculty on Sotheby’s Institute’s MA in Contemporary Art. Previously she was ‘Curator, International Art’ at Tate Modern, where she co-curated The World Goes Pop (2015), and was responsible for Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013) and Ruins in Reverse (2013). She is the author of “Pop Artand Women Artists” both in Thames & Hudson’s Art Essentials series and the co-editor of a volume of collected essays, “New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms” (Routledge, 2021). As an independent curator, her recent curatorial work includes: Carol Rama: Eye of Eyes (Lévy Gorvy, New York, 2019), Boom: Art and Industry in 1960s Italy (Tornabuoni, London, 2018) Invisible Cities (Waddington Custot, London, 2018) and Evolutionary Travels, the inaugural show of Fundación Arte in Buenos Aires in 2016.
A DRINKS RECEPTION WILL FOLLOW THE TALK
If you wish to buy the latest books by Flavia Frigeri, please click the folling links:
https://thamesandhudson.com/women-artists-art-essentials-9780500294352
https://thamesandhudson.com/pop-art-art-essentials-9780500293584
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