FORNASETTI - EXHIBITION

One Hundred Years of Practical Madness, accompanied by the artist’s son, Barnaba Fornasetti, Piero Fornasetti

The Fornasetti exhibition celebrates a creativity that overflows into art and embodies, in its creations, a level of taste and refinement that is hard to surpass.

Painter, printmaker, designer, collector, stylist, refined craftsman, decorator, gallerist, and exhibition curator, Piero Fornasetti was an extraordinarily rich and complex figure. He designed and produced around 13,000 objects and decorations—an entire universe shaped equally by rigorous artistic and artisanal design and by unbridled imagination, surreal invention, and poetry.

The exhibition itinerary unfolds through sections that range from his early pictorial works, close to the Novecento movement, to his artist’s book printing studio; from his close collaboration with Gio Ponti in the 1950s and 1960s, through the more challenging years of the 1970s, and up to 1988, the year of his death. This long period was largely marked by the dominant rationalist dogma of functionality in architecture and design, which relegated him to a marginal position without ever extinguishing his volcanic creativity.

The exhibition features more than 1,000 works, most of them drawn from the extraordinary archive curated by Barnaba Fornasetti, who continues today the work initiated by his father.