Ettore Sottsass

ETTORE SOTTSASS (Austria, 1917 - Italy, 2007) for Zanotta.
Postmodern side table "Lipari". Italy, ca.1990.
In ceramic.
Beech wood top, with silkscreened laminate.
With publisher's label.
Measurements: 42 x 40 x 40 cm.

The "Lipari" design is a remarkable example of Sottsass's late work: it reflects his celebrated Memphis-era aesthetic: carefree, daring and interested in an expressive visual language. It is a side table with a postmodern aesthetic, with a circular top with silk-screened foil (with an attractive geometric design) on beech wood and an anthracite ceramic vase-shaped support. The result is both functional and sculptural.

Sottsass is one of the most influential designers of the second half of the 20th century. On the one hand he developed a successful career in industrial design for Olivetti, from typewriters and computers to office interiors, and on the other he created striking and unconventional objects that challenged the bourgeois clientele to redraw their concept of the limits of "good taste". Between 1981 and 1988, Sottsass created markedly nonconformist furniture together with a small group of international architects, with whom he formed the Memphis group. The extreme ideas that Sottsass had already elaborated and sketched out in the previous decades were implemented in the 1980s, with a playful-looking ease, in collaboration with the Memphis founders. Together with them, Sottsass discarded traditional design principles and transformed a discipline that had hitherto been governed by production and functionality into a visually communicative spectacle. Like Sottsass himself, design became news, visual sensation and even tactile entertainment. He is currently represented at MoMA and the Metropolitan in New York, the Design Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.