Alessandro Mendini and his Design World

Alessandro Mendini was a companion and a teacher of a lifetime, generous and kind.
My CRO vase
perhaps summarizes the osmotic exchange that took place through our working together.
He really loved my work which I appreciated however, I tried not to lose site that every joke he made always hid an uncomfortable truth within it.
Alessandro Mendini was a master who lightly crossed my life.
Perhaps the thing that fascinated me the most was his brilliant irony combined with a lively intelligence, which for an Umbrian Woman Artist, of medieval-Renaissance style and influence, was a real bomb shell.

The obsessive precision in the iconic definition of each form, in Mendini’s work of the last period, is still a topic of great interest for my research.
Alessandro Mendini was a man with an open mind and born of bourgeois culture.

A multidisciplinary figure: architect, writer, editor of magazines, intellectual, with a transversal cultural approach that he had been able to deepen and update thanks to his journalist activity.
Mendini took the magazines: Casabella, Modo and Domus, in different directions as he explored subjects in multiple languages related to design, art and architecture, taking Italian design beyond national borders, declaring a new design that encompassed an emotional intelligence, a warmth and freedom of line that was distinctly different from the coldness of the elegant Bel Design of Milanese culture.
Following his magazine experience and his collaboration with the post-radical avant-garde Studio Alchimia, he and his brother Francesco established Atelier Mendini which opened in Milan in1989 I first met Alessandro Mendini on the occasion of the performance “Nulla”, an idea for an environment, in which I presented at the P.A.C.
in Milan my Sonorous Garment, was 1984.

Subsequently, his new project Pittura Progettata e Design Pittorico”Designed Painting” corresponded to his desire to reset, to make a clean sweep of his previous experiences and to devote himself to an artistic project that involved both his life and his work.

Through my art and design performance pieces I attempted to interpret figuratively, in the genesis of this project (1986).

Mendini always exercised a thought beyond the contingent, accompanied by a great awareness of his mission in the world.
Alexander was a metaphysical man, but he understood people’s desires and weaknesses.

For Alessandro Mendini, design was the pretext to navigate within the contradictions of the human being.

He was ambiguous and idealistic, anti-establishment because in his bourgeois state he liked to corrode all established positions from within.

Alessandro Mendini was always looking for a poetic and critical thought in the project that would justify its creation. He often used paradox to bring antithetical issues into the right balance.
One of his phrases that is unforgettable for me is: “Live daily life as a drama and play down living ”

ALESSANDRO MENDINI – FROM 29 OCTOBER 2020 TO 1 FEBRUARY 2021