Milan, December 17th, 2024 – 10·Corso·Como dedicates an exhibition to the Italian architect, designer, historian, and theorist Andrea Branzi, one year after his passing, celebrating his radical vision and works. Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed, curated by Alessio de’ Navasques, will be set up at the 10·Corso·Como Gallery from December 18th, 2024 to February 16th, 2025.
Awarded with three Compasso d’Oro, one of which dedicated to his career, Branzi was a multifaceted and radical figure, the author of a forward-looking approach that crossed applied arts, domestic and urban space with an unprecedented sensitivity: a ‘poetic habitat’ and interdisciplinary that the exhibition focuses on starting with the series of gold and silver jewelry, Silver & Gold, and silver and birch wood objects, Silver & Wood, made in Belgium in the second half of the 1990s and collected in a retrospective exhibition at the Ghent Design Museum in 1998.
The exhibition dedicated to Branzi is part of a path of study and reinterpretation – through the archives of artists and designers – of the applied arts, and in particular of a reconnaissance around jewelry and the concept of ornament as a cultural figure, within the artistic programme of 10·Corso·Como, which began with the exhibition Pietro Consagra. Ornamenti.
Staged in collaboration with Nicoletta Morozzi and Lorenza Branzi as well as Casa Argentaurum and Friedman Benda galleries, Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed is presented in an itinerary that lines up and creates a dialogue among works, documents, drawings and photographs. In the bright, wide spaces of the 10·Corso·Como Gallery, the installation, conceived as a seamless flow, composes a landscape of objects spanning a period of time from the mid-1980s to the latest creations of 2023.
At the heart of the exhibition are the jewels, gold and silver garlands, crowns and necklaces that “adorn the human body in a landscape, heightening its aura with leaves and natural elements and highlighting that mystical dimension of ornamentation in its primordial meaning as a means to bring humans closer to the divine,” as Alessio de’ Navasques writes in the text accompanying the exhibition. The title of the exhibition recalls an assumption by Branzi appeared in an article published in the magazine Interni in November 2005: “if there have been societies without cities and architecture, there have never been societies without jewelry; because they are, above all, the obvious sign of a magical elaboration of the human being, and the symbol of the search for a secret order in the laws of the cosmos.”
This desire to overcome a certain rigidity and self-referentiality of modern architecture and design runs through Branzi’s thinking. Its implementation is realised by the hybridising with natural elements, an operation of symbolic re-signification that extends from applied arts to furniture, lamps and monumental scale projects.
The exhibition reconstructs the special relationship woven with Belgium between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, with private and institutional commissions, through the hybrid objects of the Wood & Stones series – boxes and sculptural lamps -, in which the use of wood and stone seems intended to heal the distance between science and nature, to the silver objects of the Silver & Wood series in which the elements of the traditional tea service are translated into linear forms with intersections of branches and plant fragments. It is again the purity of the silver weavings of baskets and containers that evoke archaic and symbolic forms, with references to Shaker culture. The monumental installation of the Grande Vaso in Ghent in 1999 is traced through documentation and prototypes.
Highlighting the lines of continuity in the designer’s incessant and all-encompassing reflection on the tension between modernity and nature, the exhibition includes original examples of the famous seating series Domestic Animals – conceived in the mid-1980s – in dialogue with the more recent series Stones 2A – already part of the Trees & Stones exhibition at the Friedman Benda gallery in New York in 2012, where trunks and stones as elements of a prehuman archaeology relate to industrial materials – and Germinal Bench of 2022, in which the use of bamboo canes, compared by Branzi to a forest of organ pipes, reverberates the concept of nature as a form of infinite architecture.
One year after his passing, the 10·Corso·Como Gallery dedicates an exhibition to Andrea Branzi’s production of jewelry and objects in silver and gold, inviting visitors to experience the radical mindset of the Italian architect, designer and theorist.
The cultural programming of 10·Corso·Como, started within the Rethinking 10·Corso·Como project, animates the Gallery location, making it an arena of dialogue between different arts and a meeting ground for new experiences. The new 10·Corso·Como follows the imprint desired by Tiziana Fausti, by presenting itself as an inclusive platform for exchange.
About Andrea Branzi
Seminal Italian architect, designer and educator Andrea Branzi held a lifelong fascination with how humans interact with objects, and sought to reconcile design and architecture with the evolving challenges of contemporary society. As a leading theorist, Branzi contributed an analytical and academic approach to the discipline.
Born in Florence in 1938, Branzi studied at the Florence School of Architecture, receiving his degree in 1966. From 1964 to 1974, he was a founding member of the experimental group Archizoom, which envisioned the groundbreaking No-Stop-City among other projects. Branzi was a key member of Studio Alchimia, founded in 1976, and went on to associate with the Memphis Group in the early 1980s.
In the 1980s, Branzi turned away from the prevailing, highly-stylized aesthetic of postmodern design. The key expression of this new direction was his seminal Animali Domestici (1985-1986) series, which featured rectilinear forms intersected by unfinished logs, sticks, and wood offcuts, in an attempt to bring the artificial and natural into equilibrium.
Branzi distinguished himself as a co-founder of Domus Academy, the first international post-graduate school for design, and was a professor and chairman of the School of Interior Design at the Politecnico di Milano until 2009. He was a three-time recipient of the Compasso d’Oro, honored for individual or group effort in 1979, 1987, and 1995. In 2008, Branzi was named an Honorary Royal Designer in the United Kingdom and he received an honorary degree from La Sapienza in Rome. That same year, his work was featured in an installation at the Fondation Cartier, Paris. In 2018, Branzi was the recipient of the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize in Visual Arts by the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
Branzi’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma, Italy; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, USA; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France; Le Fonds Régional d’art contemporain (FRAC), Orleans, France; Design Museum Gent, Belgium; Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, France; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal, Canada; Museo del Design Italiano, Triennale di Milano, Italy; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; Museum of Modern Art, USA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Vitra Design Museum, Weil-am-Rhein, Germany amongst others.
Andrea Branzi passed away in October 2023.
