ETTORE SOTTSASS (Austria, 1917 - Italy, 2007). Mug. Silver. Manufacture... Lot 95

ETTORE SOTTSASS (Austria, 1917 - Italy, 2007). Mug. Silver. Manufacture stamp on the back: "Swid Powell, Argentina". Measurements: 5,6 x 11 x 5,5 cm. 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 making industrial designs for the Olivetti firm, from typewriters and computers to office interiors, and on the other he created striking and unconventional objects that challenge the bourgeois clientele to redraw their concept of the limit 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.