ANIMALOVE 22-9 /29-10 /2022
is a collection of vases by Anna Gili

Contemporary Cluster Gallery, Rome presents Anna Gili’s limited edition collection of glazed ceramic vases, Animalove, born in 2013.

Zoomorphic objects-home sculptures, a collection inspired by animals that have either really existed, are our pets or that are part of our collective imagination, it includes the “Puppies” vases and the “KumaChang” vase, in memory of the designer’s faithful dog, that is depicted and reimagined into the form of a noble black horse.

The resulting objects are elegant compositions and stylistic forms combined with signs-synthesis of the animal that each ceramic piece represents.

“Dolly” is a tribute to the famous cloned sheep, “Big Mary” is in memory of the largest elephant in recorded history, even bigger than Jumbo, who was cruelly and senselessly hanged in a public square in Erwin, Tennessee in 1916. “Babe” inspired by the 1995 film Babe, in which a brave pig makes us reflect onthe sad fate of these cute yet highly intelligent animals.

Discover ANIMALOVE – COLLECTION VASES

“Art design” who could invent it?
Only a woman prophet and pioneer
like Anna Gili
(In Milan in the early 1980s)

By Francois Zille
Visual Anthropologist and Communicator
Teacher and critic of the expressive codes of the digital age

In the Weimar of the 1920s, Ise Frank, wife of Walter Gropius, the main founder of the Bauhaus, was able to masterfully grasp and spread its quintessence throughout the world, despite the opposition and oppression of its strictly male-dominated designers.

Life has always been hard for the female gender in art and design and this is documented in detail by the renowned publishing house of Benedikt Taschen that published, in 2019, an important academic volume by Patrick Rössler, “Bauhaus Models” – A Tribute To Pioneering Women Artists.

In this first wave of the digital age we are witnessing a brutal deficit in philology and a dramatic gap in culture and structure on the part of the new generations of designers. The new schools and academies, increasingly ostensibly cynical and hypoprojectual force them to immediately become champions of planetary copy and paste.

And then without any shame “sin verguenza” they blatantly pass them off as inventors of everything that exists and persists.
Among today’s themes in the trendy phase, the zoomorphic semiotic, finds always more devotees on every front, to which Anna Gili was the first to dedicate a scientific mapping as well as a gorgeous design research, historiographically documented by the book “ANIMALOVE” published by Logo Fausto, Lupetti Editore in 2014.

I consider Anna Gili “the queen of semiotics” for her rare ability to observe things, people, animals and objects and to be able to concentrate them into a sign that is always alive, empathic and rigorous, with a unique aristocratic aesthetic.

Her ability to master various expressive codes outside and inside the digital age, and to operate in parallel on different design paradigms, have allowed her to carry out a pioneering and innovative “Magna Exploratio” across the board, with the Renaissance geniuses that inspire her and the Franciscan rigour of its Umbrian roots that support it, in multiple fields including urban furniture, the engineering use of colour, iconic furniture, hieratic objects, creative ceramics… celebrating marriage for the first time since the beginning of the 80’s of the true love between Art and Design, of which the “CRO” vase vibrates in unison with the great original quantum vibration.

FZ Roma, 2022