Mendini biography

Internationally recognised as a refined scholar of a sui generis approach to the object (be it a building or a design) which is rooted in the close relationship between art and design, with a particular focus on the use of colour, and a subtle and constant vein of irony, he was, from the outset, very critical of the consumerist society, and constantly walked the line between inspiration from, on the one hand, the world of literature and, on the other, the world of pictures and paintings that had accompanied him since his early childhood.

His weresome of the most iconic moments in Italian production over the last sixty years, from the Proust armchair (1978), to the countless collections of objects designed for Alessi, a multitude of products which – as noted by the most recent and attentive commentators – retraces the obsession of Mendini's surrogate father Ponti for a very restrictive group of fundamental themes (the Ponti ideario) analysed in a Alessandro Mendini - Architectuul COWOS