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Alessandro Mendini
Alessandro Mendini is a trained architect and designer who was born in Milan in 1931.
A partner in the Nizzoli firm and co-founder of the Global Tools alternative movement,
he was successively editor-in-chief of the magazines Casabella, Modo, and the architecture
magazine Domus. In the late 1970s he joined the Studio Alchimia and developed his
theories on kitsch and the banal object. His career then built up around collaborations
with firms such as Alessi, Venini, Philips, Bisazza and Swatch. In 1989 he created the
studio Atelier Mendini.
He is purposefully polyvalent and associates his work with interior design, painting,
music and literature. Alessandro Mendini’s pieces invent, duplicate, superimpose and defy
definition. His objects never resemble their function, they instead take the form of the
feeling they elicit from us, thus making his work firmly anti-conventional.
In 2002, the Fondation Cartier presented Alessandro Mendini’s most emblematic works in
the exhibition Fragilisme, alongside a series of commissions that included the monumental
Poltrona di Proust – a famous Regency armchair whose pointillist design has reappeared on
various objects since 1978 – and the Petite Cathédrale, entirely covered in mosaic.
He is currently creating the design for a Fondation Cartier exhibition; presented from
May 13 to September 30, 2012, this thematic exhibition unites a selection of works often
associated with self-taught art or art brut.
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