PARIS - Sottsass' "Kachinas" Exhibition in France

Galerie Downtown François Laffanour is organizing an exhibition which opens the 22nd of September 2011, a presentation of vases created by Ettore Sottsass, inspired by native American culture, the Hopi culture.

These vases are of excellent quality, very playful and aesthetic, and the career of this important personality of the design, Ettore Sottsass, recently deceased, who is represented in major collections worldwide, so as the scarcity of these pieces enhances their interest.

The rare work of this famous designer has never been shown in France before. The display will be shown in a setting created by the director of the gallery, François Laffanour, showcasing how this collection spans many epochs and geographical contexts, between culture and modernity.

About the Designer

Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) was a grandee of late 20th century Italian design. Best known as the founder of the early 1980s Memphis collective, he also designed iconic electronic products for Olivetti, as well as beautiful glass and ceramics.

Wherever he went, Ettore Sottsass carried a camera to photograph anything that caught his eye. Doors, temples, kitchens, billboards: nothing escaped him. This was a man who took 1,780 photographs on a twelve day trip to South America, who toyed with publishing a book consisting of pictures of walls and for years photographed every hotel room in which he had slept with a woman.

Once in Marseille, Sottsass was snapping at a barber’s shop sign when he was forced to surrender his camera. It was a smuggler’s nookie nest. In Egypt, he was photographing a rotting window when the police pounced. The window belonged to a police station. "Most normal people (not just policemen) don’t like to face the reality that all things eventually decay," he wrote later. "I believe that the future only begins when the past has been completely dismantled, its logic reduced to dust and nostalgia is all that remains."

Ettore Sottsass devoted his life and work to dismantling the past in his various roles as artist, architect, industrial designer, glass maker, publisher, theoretician and ceramicist. The past to him was the rationalist doctrine of his father, Ettore Sottsass Sr., a prominent Italian architect. Fond though he was of his parents, Ettore Jr. favoured a different approach. "When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism," he once said. "It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting." (Biography: © Design Museum Collection).

Read more about the designer at Wikepedia.com