The exhibition at The Met Breuer will highlight landmark projects, including 5 of the original industrial ceramic totems that comprised the Menhir, Ziggurat, Stupas, Hydrants, and Gas Pumps(1965-66) project displayed at the Galleria Sperone in 1967; the iconoclastic and minimalist "Superboxes" (begun 1966); and the "Environment"—a system of modular cabinets for MoMA's 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Designed as a conceptual prototype/provocation in the 1970s spirit of questioning social norms, the "Environment" proposes liberation from traditional architectural structures and the social values associated with home ownership in favor of an open-source shared domestic utility catering to a more nomadic or communal existence. This sequence of visionary projects introduced many of the concepts, materials, and techniques that informed the founding of Memphis in 1981.

 

Sottsass and a small international group of like-minded designers called themselves Memphis in a nod to the Bob Dylan song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," the ancient capital of Egypt, and the modern city in Tennessee. The collective produced furnishings that were a radical departure from accepted design conventions by reinterpreting design's basic elements: function, form, material, surface, and color. The totemic "Carleton" Room Divider from 1981 is an outstanding example; its visually disjointed form is antithetical to neatly ordered conventional bookcases. Sottsass justified the odd angles by claiming that books never stand straight anyway. Like Memphis, "Carleton" self-consciously embodies pop and vernacular references that play with perceptions of high and low-veneered in cheap plastic laminates like those used on countertops of 1950s American diners but constructed using very fine cabinetmaking techniques. While marketed and priced beyond the reach of average consumers, the example demonstrates Memphis's insistence on a designer's creativity and agency to determine the final product, a value that today contributes to the blurring of the art and design markets and the rise of "collectible design."

 

"Masters," the final section of the exhibition, will present selections of Sottsass's lesser-known late work in dialogue with pieces by four important 20th-century artists and designers: Piet Mondrian, Jean Michel Frank, Gio Ponti, and Shiro Kuramata. Sottsass's writings, which often reference the objects that influenced him, appear throughout the exhibition. The inclusion of Frank's Low table(1983) and a few examples of Sottsass-influenced contemporary design serve as formal comparisons that elucidate basic design and aesthetic principles and how Sottsass diverged from them to become a true design radical.