Marquis Vladi Orengo, Casa Orengo, Turin, 1949
Count Vergnano di Villar, Turin
Franco Semenzato & Co., Venice, "Mobili, arredi, oggetti vari," April 21, 1985, lot 67
Galerie Denys Bosselet, Paris
Marc-André Hubin, Avenue Foch, Paris, 1986
Mara Cremniter, Paris
Barry Friedman Ltd., New York, 1994
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1997
"Design Italian Style: Furniture by Carlo Mollino and Carlo Graffi," Barry Friedman Ltd., New York, May 1 - July 11, 1997
"Carlo Mollino: Arabesques," Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, September 20, 2006-January 7, 2007
ILLUSTRATED
"Casa verso la collina," Domus, no. 265, December 1951, pp. 17, 19
"Scoperte & Riscoperte," Domus, no. 650, May 1984, pp. 36-37
Giovanni Brino, Carlo Mollino: Architettura come Autobiografia, Milan, 1985, p. 124
Germano Celant, "Un appartamento a Parigi," Domus, no. 681, March 1987, p. 55
Rossella Colombari, Carlo Mollino Catalogo Del Mobili – Furniture Catalogue, Milan, 2005, pp. 66-67
Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, The Furniture of Carlo Mollino, New York, 2006, pp. 184, 225
Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, eds., Carlo Mollino: Arabesques, exh. cat., Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Milan, 2007, p. 83
Italian • 1905 - 1973
Carlo Mollino made sexy furniture. His style may have grown out of the whiplash curves of Art Nouveau, but the sinuous lines of his furniture were more humanoid than vegetal, evoking arched backs and other body parts. Mollino was also an avid aviator, skier and racecar driver — he designed his own car for Le Mans. His love of speed and danger comes across in his designs, which MoMA curator Paola Antonelli has described as having "frisson."
Mollino had no interest in industrial design and the attendant constraints of material costs and packaging. His independent wealth allowed him to pick and choose projects, resulting in an oeuvre of unique, often site-specific works that were mostly executed by the Turin joinery firm Apelli & Varesio. Apart from a coffee table that he designed in 1950 for the American company Singer & Sons, his furniture never went into production. Notwithstanding the support of Gio Ponti, Mollino's design contemporaries largely dismissed him as an eccentric outsider. However, the combination of scarcity (Mollino only made several hundred works in his lifetime), exquisite craftsmanship and idiosyncratic "frisson" has rightly placed Carlo Mollino in the highest tier of twentieth-century design collecting.
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