From 4th of June to 31st of July 2010, Lucien Schweitzer Gallery, Luxembourg.
In collaboration with MEMPHIS MILANO, curated by Aldo Cibic, with the collaboration of Nathalie Du Pasquier.
“Starting up in the 80s, Memphis is a movement which caused significant changes in the world of design.
Its work represented a temporal rupture from the dominant functionalist tendencies that existed in these days, affirming a more sensorial and iconic approach.
The exhibition “Backstage” gained its name because of its gathering of a sequence of conscious and unconscious choices, experimentation moments, and energy and joy this group experienced.
Starting up in the 80s, Memphis is a movement which caused significant changes in the world of design.
Its work represented a temporal rupture from the dominant functionalist tendencies that existed in these days, affirming a more sensorial and iconic approach.
The exhibition “Backstage” gained its name because of its gathering of a sequence of conscious and unconscious choices, experimentation moments, and energy and joy this group experienced.
The main general quarters of Memphis were located in a 40 m2 apartment in which lived Barbara and Ettore. Il was here that decisions were taken.
Usually, we were seven or eight persons. We’d begin after dinner and we never knew at what time we’d finish. There always was music (by Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash), white wine, and a little marijuana.
Everyone arrived with a job done beforehand during the night or the weekend and in no time these drawings changed into furniture and really special objects.
During the second half of the 1980s, Memphis stops working as a group. In a short time period, all over the world, many pieces on the market are showing a clear influence of its language.
In the beginning of the 1990s, the impulsion that pushed for creativity almost totally disappeared. The designer and the industrial have no more confrontation on a dialectic level.
The designer works as an industrial and the industrial works as a designer. The result is a design of great quality on the level of realization, however, lacking soul.
The reason for which, 30 years later, Memphis continues giving impulses, is that beyond the intact representation of forceful and fascinating pieces, and through experimentation and productions that break away from homologations and opportunism, we can imagine constructing a future.
It may well be that through the structural crisis in the system we can find the force and courage to find new ways.
Ettore invented a new vocabulary that was to our disposition to produce personal interpretations. The particular characteristic of many pieces was given by the usage of inedited materials.
By these means, the Abet plastic laminates are probably the most distinctive sign of Memphis’s iconography. “Bacterio”, “Spugna” and other decorative patterns realised in white and black or with other strongly contrasting colours, were emblematic in relation to the research undertaken by Sottsass and other designers. It demonstrated how plastic laminates imitating wood or marble, in opposition to its more common usage, could offer new decors a more personal and autonomous identity.
In the case of Alpi wood, it is interesting to notice how new materials can be found unexpectedly.
During his first visit in the fabric, Sottsass was invited to visit the creation of reconstituted wood, which, at the end of the production chain, was an imitation of natural essences that are used for the construction of shelves and kitchens. Following this decisive moment, Sottsass asked if one could use and colour the material. It was thanks to this intuition that furniture such as Freemont and Tartar were created.
In the particular case of Abet, laminated wood entered the production chain by “memphisising” bars, restaurants, bathrooms and many other locations around the globe.”
Aldo Cibic
See also the post on Abitare Magazine.
