Description

In 1981, two young gallery owners Paola and Rossella Colombari happened upon the furniture of Carlo Mollino (1905 1973), an enigmatic, unclassifiable, and then-unknown figure in Italian design. When they organized the first Mollino furniture auction in Venice in 1985, they never imagined the sale would trigger a massive international collectors market for Mollino s pioneering works. The designer s sought-after objects would soon sell for millions. This volume presents a wealth of iconographic material vintage photos, drawings, sketches, and photomontages drawn from Mollino s archives at the Turin Politecnico and some previously unpublished documents and images. The book includes a contribution by the architect Mario Cucinella, and a photographic portfolio by Uli Weber. It is not an exhaustive critical monograph, but instead bears witness with novelistic sweep. The Colombari sisters write about Mollino s creative mindset, his architecture and design, his photography, his lifelong passion for speed, his eroticism, and the overlap of his personal and professional life from a childhood in Turin through his death in 1973. No one could portray Mollino, the man and the artist, more convincingly than the two women who brought his legacy to light.