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SILVER Seller in Pistoia, Italy
A rare floor lamp model De Luz from Gavina's Ultramobile collection, the lamp has a solid blue wooden frame and base and two neon lights in a plexiglass shade. The De Luz lamp was designed by Sandro Bagnoli for Simon Gavina in the 1970s and was inspired by the street lamps in the garden of the Saint-Jean-de-Luz casino designed and built by French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens in 1927. Simon Gavina was born in 1968 from the meeting of Dino Gavina and Maria Simoncini with some of the leading representatives of architecture and art. Since the early 1950s, Dino Gavina had started to collaborate with architects and designers - such as Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglioni, Ignazio Gardella, Carlo and Tobia Scarpa, Kazuhide Takahama and Marco Zanuso - and in 1960 he founded the company that bore his name, chaired by Carlo Scarpa. On the one hand, Gavina is attentive to the most advanced directions in design research and its protagonists, and on the other he is sensitive to the stimuli coming from artistic creativity. The meeting point of this dual tension is certainly the experience of Simon and his collections Ultrarazionale (1968), Ultramobile (1971) and Metamobile (1974), a progressive exploration of possible research and experimentation. Ultrarazionale presented "sculptural" pieces, designed by Scarpa with extreme care in the choice of materials, detail solutions and workmanship. A few years later Ultramobile's "functional works of art" look at the dialogue between artistic research and production for the domestic environment with inspired results of strong visual impact. Objects taken from surrealist poetics become furniture-works of art with strong symbolic values, paying homage to artists such as René Magritte, Constantin Brancusi, Man Ray, Sebastian Matta and Meret Oppenheim. Matta's pop chairs, Ray's Les grands trans-Parents mirror or Oppenheim's gilded pedestal table managed to carve out interesting and, in part, unexpected market spaces, along with critical attention. Ultramobile has explored 'other' directions that aim to extend into lateral and borderline territories with respect to design culture and at the same time to enrich it and free it from the narrow constraints imposed by cultural models, production methods and the market. Finally, Metamobile is a precise proposal of simple and low-priced furniture, also self-produced. Like Enzo Mari's designs - provocatively emblematic of the entire collection - for self-made furniture, it challenges the rules of the market and distribution. In its history and present, Simon encompasses elements of great interest and vitality from the point of view of the "contents" and meanings underlying its cultural and entrepreneurial choices; it also boasts a heritage of projects and products that have explored innovative paths and at the same time have been able to establish themselves, with critics and the public, as design icons.
ID: 6186-1683793425-63308
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