until Sunday February 16 2025
10 Corso Como, Gallery
corso Como 10
20154 Milan
Italy
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10 Corso Como dedicates an exhibition titled "Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed, curated by Alessio de’ Navasques," to the Italian architect, designer, historian, and theorist Andrea Branzi, one year after his passing, celebrating his radical vision and works.
Awarded with three Compasso d’Oro, one of which was 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 a 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 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 from the mid-1980s to the latest creations of 2023.
This desire to overcome a certain rigidity and self-referentiality of modern architecture and design runs through Branzi’s thinking. Its implementation is realized by the hybridizing 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 refection 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 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.
