Mutina presents Du Pasquier’s doubles: objects that change function when flipped

For grapefruits and red carnations, for bananas and a small cactus, for white carnations and hard-boiled eggs. Coppie di Fatto – the new collection by French artist and designer Nathalie Du Pasquier for the Italian ceramics brand Mutina – plays with the idea of the double: identical vases and containers that, when flipped, change function each time. “A vase for flowers or a bowl for cookies, depending on which way it is placed. They must always be presented in pairs to make the two functions explicit,” the designer explains.

Du Pasquier’s career has always intertwined art and design. Alongside Ettore Sottsass, Michele De Lucchi, Andrea Branzi, and Arata Isozaki, she co-founded the Memphis Group. In 1987, she left object production to focus exclusively on painting. Her works, characterized by simple geometries, bold colors, and stark contrasts—the same features that defined her Memphis furniture—have been shown in major international institutions, including the Kunsthalle Vienna, the Pace Gallery in Seoul, and the Macro in Rome, which in 2021, curated by Luca lo Pinto, hosted a monumental solo exhibition.

 Nathalie Du Pasquier

Her collaboration with Mutina, which began in 2019, marked a true return to product design for the French artist. From their first meeting came Brac: a series of glazed bricks, colorful flipped architectural modules exploring the relationship between architectural function and decorative ornament.

Coppie di Fatto continues this line of irony and experimentation. The collection includes seven pairs of handmade ceramic objects, wheel-thrown according to Italian artisanal tradition and spray-glazed in a vivid palette. Each vase is signed and numbered, and can only be purchased in pairs.

But that’s not all: a second series of vases, called Coppie di Fatto Black, abandons the primary color palette typical of Du Pasquier’s work and is coated in matte black using a dip-glazing technique. Seven pieces sold individually evoke totems from a distant time.

Much like the Hanged Man in the tarot cards or the “world beyond the mirror” in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, with Coppie di Fatto Nathalie Du Pasquier signs a project that invites us to look at the world upside down, questioning our habitual perspective—especially on those objects that inevitably belong to our daily life.

It is a simple yet powerful act of estrangement, a gesture that has always been central to Du Pasquier’s poetics, just as it has been for Memphis. Sottsass’s “pairs of vases,” conceived as two autonomous forms that acquire meaning only in juxtaposition, and the Westside living room chairs and armchairs, which play on the “cultural doubles” of the Cold War, are just some of the group’s projects that explore the idea of flipped yet interdependent worlds.