27 June – 26 July 2025
Studio Casoli is pleased to present an exhibition dedicated to Ettore Sottsass, a leading figure in twentieth-century design and visual culture. Architect, artist, and visionary, Sottsass left an indelible mark on his era, transforming everyday objects into narrative forms capable of evoking meaning, recollection, and a sense of spirituality.
Filicudi became a personal and creative space that Sottsass chose in the 1980s, together with his wife Barbara Radice, as a home and summer refuge. On this island of volcanic stones and mutable horizons, among whitewashed walls and light that sculpts volumes, Sottsass discovered a contemplative dimension. Immersed in a Mediterranean South he cherished for its ancient humanity and essential architecture, he cultivated a language in which place, remembrance, and ritual converge. The exhibition brings together a selection of works dating from the 1960s onwards.
“In reality, light does not merely illuminate — light narrates. Light confers meaning, draws metaphors, shapes the scene for the universal comedy. Light narrates architecture itself “. This reflection, written by Sottsass in 1988 in one of his nocturnal notebooks, captures the profound essence of his practice: to create objects and architectures that do not simply inhabit space, but rather narrate it, imbuing it with significance, resonance, and presence.
On view, a group of ceramic sculptures and glass pieces evoke archaic geometries. Torno Subito (Superbox), conceived in 1966 for Poltronova, is a towering cabinet clad in plastic laminate; Tartar, a table designed for Memphis in 1985, combines elemental geometric forms with audaciously coloured surfaces. These works stand as enduring exemplars of Italian radical design. A selection of photographs captures fragments of light, essential architectures, and ancient stones.
Sottsass consistently envisioned design as a ritual act: the gesture of lighting a lamp or placing a stone becomes an action that transcends utility to attain the symbolic. The exhibition unfolds as a path of suggestion and reflection on the capacity of objects to preserve stories, forge relationships, and serve as instruments for poetically inhabiting time.
Ettore Sottsass was born in Innsbruck in 1917 and graduated in architecture in Turin in 1939. After the war, he established his studio in Milan and embarked on a thirty-year collaboration with Olivetti, designing projects such as the Elea 9003 computer and the celebrated Valentine typewriter. During his extensive travels, Sottsass encountered mandalas, yantras, ritual objects, and ethnographic artefacts, recognising in them forms, materials, colours, and symbolic motifs that addressed social, spiritual, and sensorial needs. In 1981, he founded the Memphis collective, radically transforming the language of contemporary design.
Today, his works are held in the permanent collections of the world’s most prestigious institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
