Dedicated to Nendo

Cappellini celebrates 10 years of collaboration with Nendo and his Créateur de l’année award with an exhibition dedicated to the famous designer in its Paris showroom.

The exhibition, entirely in black and white, which contrasts against the champagne backdrop of the showroom, tells the story of the relationship between Nendo and Cappellini from the past to present.

The display particularly focuses on the design process, always characterised by the lightness of forms and the irony of signs, completely defying gravity. Cappellini was the first furniture brand that Nendo started working with and, after a year of collaboration working on project prototypes, the Yuki screen was presented at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2006.

Installazione dedicata a Nendo, Showroom Cappellini, Parigi — Exhibition dedicated to Nendo, Cappellini showroom, Paris

Over these past ten years working with Cappellini, Nendo has experimented with a variety of materials, always minimising them to make simple designs: for example, the Thin Black table, the Island tables, and the Drop bookshelf in metal, the solid wood tables in the Peg collection, and the soft upholstered collection of Peg chairs and sofas.

In Japanese, Nendo means “modelling clay”. By adopting this name the design studio implicates the same flexibility, creative power and surprising childlike simplicity. Oki Sato, a native of Toronto, Canada, graduated in architecture from Waseda University in Tokyo in 2002. The same year he founded Nendo with fifteen colleagues who he met during the lectures. Together, they developed their design philosophy which was exemplified in their first performance “Streeterior”, presented in Tokyo and Milan in 2003. Nendo’s creations are exhibited in the most prestigious museums and galleries in the world.