garage BENTIVOGLIO

“With Marcel Breuer, culture entered mass production; with Ultramobile, poetry entered it,” reads a short manifesto from the seventies. Above this text, abandoned as if on an Alberto Savinio beach, various pieces of furniture from Simon—the company founded in 1968 by Dino Gavina and Maria Simonicini—are scattered across a white field. The Bolognese entrepreneur had already been the architect of two other major ventures, Flos and Gavina spa, a portion of whose catalog would soon be sold to Knoll. Simon’s Ultramobile collection stood in stark contrast to his previous experiences: the focus quickly shifted to artists rather than designers, often rethinking or reissuing Dadaist or Surrealist objects. Meanwhile, in those years, student and labor protests were bringing new social needs and desires to the surface, and Italian design looked overseas to reinvent itself; Emilio Ambasz’s exhibition at the MoMA served as the watershed moment between the masters who had dominated the scene until then and the new names, often gathered into groups. Gavina’s project had no connection to the questions being asked at the time; the artists’ works were not tied to any corporate know-how, but were instead the product of individual creative flair. There was no relationship between form and function, and above all, rather than prefiguring new worlds, they seemed to evoke reassuring vestiges of the past—things we had already encountered in some fantasy or dreamlike moment. Two brass legs fixed beneath an elliptical top are the result of an interrupted metamorphosis; Meret Oppenheim drew on zoomorphic surrealism to create a small golden table. We are not told which animal they belong to; they are too large to be from a common hen, yet perhaps too small to belong to some long-extinct prehistoric creature. But on the tabletop, we find a few traces: others like it have undergone the same transformation, though they managed to fly away from us.