Piero Fornasetti in Milan

On the occasion of the centenary of Piero Fornasetti’s birth, the Triennale Design Museum presents an unprecedented exhibition of the artist’s work, curated by his son Barnaba.

Triennale Design Museum chose to pay tribute to Fornasetti to underscore the artist’s role and propose a new and more correct reading of his work in the context of the critical and theoretical debate on ornament as a structural element of project.

Painter, engraver and printer, designer, collector, stylist, refined craftsman, art gallery manager and exhibition promoter, Fornasetti has been an extremely rich and complex personality. He designed and made approximately 13.000 objects and decorations. His world is animated by the rigour of project, of art and craftsmanship, but also by unbridled fantasy, surrealist invention and poetry.

The exhibition’s path walks through the artist’s start as a painter in the spirit of Novecento, his artist’s books printing workshop, his tight collaboration with Gio Ponti in the 1950s and 1060s and the harder 1970s until 1988, the year of Fornasetti’s death, and covers a long period overawed on the whole by the ruling rationalist dogma of functionality in architecture and design, which confined Fornasetti to a marginal role, but still could not stifle his volcanic creativity.

The exhibition includes more than 700 pieces, mostly from the extraordinary Fornasetti archive in Milan, curated by Barnaba Fornasetti, who still carries on his father’s work.