Milan is preparing for the most important 7 days in the year: the Design Week. It doesn't matter if you are the boss of an important art gallery or of a bakery, or if you work in a museum or a butcher's: just fasten your seat belts and be ready to the design invasion! Milan needs space. Every little piece of wall ad all the shops, street, house, rooms will contain something creative and new. The newest design will fill every empty space in the city (usually even being pitiless with the already jammed ones - in the best Milanese tradition...).
But there is a little space, now, filled with something different. On the street level floor of the "Spazio Oberdan" (metro 1 Porta Venezia) there is an exhibit about design very different from the next coming. Spazio Oberdan is guesting the work of Laura Fiume, an italian designer daughter of a famous painter (Salvatore Fiume) previously guested there last year. This exhibition will end on the last day of the Design Week, April 22nd 2012.
I first discovered Salvatore Fiume last year, visiting his solo exhibit, and when I saw the poster about Laura Fiume presentation I immediately went to check it.
It is very intelligent to present Laura Fiume in this moment of the year, in Milan, because this let you make some consideration about what is -and what was- going on in the design world.
Laura Fiume was born in 1953 and she studied at the "Scuola Politecnica di design" where she could learn from Bruno Munari and Max Huber.
Then she completed her artistic training in Canzo (CO) working with her father and getting competence in serigraphy, ceramics and paintings.
During her life she experienced craft techniques applied to every aspect of the production, making artistic creations for tissues brands or design companies. She can be considered half designer and half painter. This mix has allowed her to create interesting objects as well as pleasant decors that remind, in some ways, the best Italian production of the 70's and 80's. Her work always gives you a sense of completeness, because you can never renounce to the base material, nor to the forms of the decoration. Shapes and body always go on together, you couldn't add anything more to both.
Even if the richest creative period was during the 80's and 90's, looking at her present production gives you a pleasant sense of art and crafts with no nostalgia. The shapes of her ceramics (I love the plates and the coffee cups) can result quite "old style" compared with the nowadays diffused design, but it is always updated with our time.
I loved the images about her paintings inspired by Philippe Stark furniture, but also the more recent paintings on thick velvet, so meteoric and physical. If you get closer, you see the handmade work, if you get closer, you get the entire composition, charming for colors and layout.
And I've not even talked about the fish, which is maybe her most famous feature. Her graphics is full of stylized fishes, like modern (and Western) ideograms. Laura Fiume went in Japan in 1978 and she was fascinated by this experience. Then, she could event present her work there (Tokyo, 2002) and her appreciation for the graphic strokes was confirmed.
The space of the Spazio Oberdan is little, the objects are few but very intense, the paintings are very nice… and the entrance is free! I think she could fully deserve a biggest space and a more complete exhibition.
Maybe even a very big stand at the "Fiera del Mobile" (April 17th-22nd) just to let the visitors understand what design is and how it could be.
A big lesson of design!
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