IT | EN

Posts in ‘POINT OF LIFE’
11/10/2024
 | POINT OF LIFE

NIKI'S DOLLS

On the French Riviera in the late 1960s, they were the joyous dream of the turbulent art that was disrupting the classical canons with the wildest imagination of Nouveau Realisme and Pop Art. Niki De Saint Phalle's Nanas announced to me, a restless 20-something, a new era that would change many things, particularly the ethics and aesthetics of the world around us. They reminded me of Jean Dubuffet's large paper and styrofoam sculptures (on view at Mudec from October 12 to February 16) that I had seen in Paris, equally irreverent and impulsive but less ironic that Flavio Lucchini - far more knowledgeable about art than I was - loved and whose meaning he explained to me.
Later, Niki's colorful dolls dancing on water along with her husband Jean Tinguely's self-propelled toys in the little square next to the Parisian Centre Pompidou became a cheerful must-see for us whenever we went to see an exhibition at that extraordinary museum. The little inflatable Nana I bought at Mamac, the contemporary art museum in Nice that chronicles its fantastical world with a large number of works, was the first accessible trophy of an art that seduced me when I could not afford more.
That is why I am happy to find Niki again at Mudec with her acrobatic elegant playful feminists and feminine dolls, but also traces of her life, her ghosts, her last Totems, in an exciting exhibition that will run until February 16.
A bit like unexpectedly meeting an old friend and rediscovering her as alive and quivering as then because for me her works have not lost an ounce of fascination and seeing them again fills me with pleasure. I am sure they will make you quiver and enjoy them too.
By the way, since Mudec is on Via Tortona a stone's throw from Superstudio, also go inside No. 27 to visit FLA, Flavio Lucchini's fashion-art museum. Another spectacular stop that speaks of different beauty.


“Niki de Saint Phalle,” Mudec, Via Tortona 56 Milan - cctober 5 through February 16 - tickets available at https://www.mudec.it/niki-de-saint-phalle/

19/09/2024
 | POINT OF LIFE

60 YEARS OF VOGUE. I WAS THERE TOO

It seems unbelievable how much time has passed since the origin of Vogue Italia (1964), the Italian edition of the American title, which was born right in via Brera on a project by Flavio Lucchini, for 17 years art-director and creative soul, and Franco Sartori, managing director and editor-in-chief. Today, Condè Nast publishing house is celebrating its 60th anniversary with the “Sixty Years of Vogue Italia” exhibition at Palazzo Clerici, nearing the end of its transformation into a museum space connected to Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. An installation that is quickly a journey through time.
Thoughts fly back to when I too, very young, was part of the editorial staff of Vogue and the publishing house's other publications, for a full fourteen years, starting in 1967. Long years in which we saw Italy, society, the economy, ethics, and fashion transform, Flavio Lucchini and I, becoming a couple, creating and directing the most significant titles of the end of the millennium, collaborating with the most famous creatives, often raised at our school, one among them the legendary editor Franca Sozzani who left us too soon.
The lesson of Vogue - beauty, elegance, quality, vision, culture, the best of the best - influenced our choices and directed our lives to the point of suggesting the idea of starting the first Superstudio (the photographic studios with attached services Superstudio 13) and then the other venues to follow over the years all always oriented in preceding the demands of the market and artists for avant-garde places where creativity and innovation would find the ideal habitat.
In a secret room like a bunker, the art-director Ferdinando Verderi has set up a parade of red, self-propelled totems as frames for as many covers, one for each year, in a story-telling of faces, styles, and messages that show the change over time and also underline its consistency in wanting to be and remain the most influential, stainless, and inimitable magazine on the fashion scene.
With a sense of an implied thanks to Vogue came FLA, the FlavioLucchiniArt Museum at Superstudio Più, where fashion becomes art, and Skira's book “The Vogue Lesson-from fashion to art” with Lucchini's six hundred fashion-art works on display.


Sixty Years of Vogue Italia - Palazzo Citterio - via Brera 13 - until Sept. 21 - reservation required

10/09/2024
 | POINT OF LIFE

THE ABSOLUTE PERFECTION OF BALLO AND BALLO

The refined ballo&ballo exhibition at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan dedicated to the legendary photographer Aldo Ballo and his wife MariRosa, reminded me of distant times when I had the privilege of working with them for Ottagono magazine. The essential and perfect photos, of absolute beauty, told with light and shadow the evolution of design without any other artifice. Sometimes Aldo would introduce a living, almost casual presence into them. Once it was my turn, in an unforgettable photo.
Life has often given me the gift of being in the right place at the right time, and so it has been enriched by basic encounters and moments, legendary friends and unforgettable events.
Such was the case with meeting Aldo and MariRosa Ballo in 1966. As a very young handyman assistant, I was already in the editorial staff of Ottagono, my first job in the design and architecture magazine wanted by the eight leading Italian contemporary furniture companies (Arflex, Artemide, Bernini, Boffi, Cassina, FLOS, DePadova and Tecno), directed by architects Giuliana Gramigna and Sergio Mazza with the art direction of Bob Noorda. All great figures who were designing the new Milan, the new Italy, the new aesthetic, the new design through their insights and works. The exhibition “ballo&ballo, photography and design in Milan” open until November 3 at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan pays tribute to the photographic work of Aldo Ballo and his wife MariRosa Toscani, sister of the more famous Oliviero, and to the essential, intelligent, ultra-modern style with which their photography approached the design of those years and made iconic objects, furniture and lamps that bore the signature of the Masters of the time, most of whom collaborated with the eight supporting companies of Ottagono. I was at the editorial staff's disposal, but Aldo also sometimes “used” me as an improvised model for his photos, for hands-only or whole. I recently and casually saw myself again sitting on the small chair of one of the eight. It is a detail from the specimen sheet that Aldo gave me for selection aimed at publication and I don't know how it remained in my hand. It dates back to 1966, the beginning of my long journey in fashion and design.
The exhibition at the Castello obviously tells much more and does so not only with selected photographs of the Ballo exemplary in their perfection, but also with a technological and interactive visual approach that makes the exhibition in the ancient underground rooms that tell us about the past but show us the present and the future even more magical.

 

Castello Sforzesco, Milan - ballo&ballo, photography and design in Milan 1956 - 2005



ARCHITECTURE
ARTS
BOOKS
DESIGN
DISCOVERING
DUBAI
EDITORIAL
EXHIBITIONS
EVENTS
FASHION
GREEN
INNOVATION
LOCATIONS
PEOPLE
PHOTOGRAPHY
TALKS
TRENDS
VIDEO
MILANO FASHION WEEK
CINEMA
POINT OF LIFE
POLITICS
LEARNING
MORE IN THE ARCHIVE
NEWS HIGHLIGHTS