MEMPHIS MILANO PRESENTS “LIVIN’ MEMPHIS”
12 April 2024
Milan, 11 April 2024 - On the occasion of the upcoming editions of Milan Art Week and Milan Design Week 2024, Memphis Milano Galleria comes alive with a new exhibition, entitled ‘LIVIN' MEMPHIS’. For the entire duration of the initiative, the space of the Gallery in Largo Treves will be turned into a domestic environment to showcase to visitors the possible uses of objects and furnishings from the Memphis catalogue. The path of the gallery undertaken by new management of the brand started in 2022 with a live musical performance based on the rearrangement of the songs that served as the soundtrack to the first Memphis Milan exhibition in 1981. The following year led to the video installation 'ENLIGHTENED', a focus on Memphis lights in dialogue with a video installation by Studio Azzurro,as a reference to their first video environment created in 1982, which marked the very first collaboration between the collective design studio and Memphis.This year the aim is to bring an even more radical initiative to life, showing the public that it is possible to experience Memphis objects in the true sense of the word. The programme of activities of Memphis Galleria Milano has been carried out by, both in past and current editions, under the creative director Christoph Radl and under the direction of Fabio Cherstich.
'LIVIN' MEMPHIS' takes distance from the museum concept of radical design, trying to verify how fun it is to stay inside that container and how interesting it is for the public to enter the spaces of the Gallery as if they were inside a inhabited house, where people can potentially eat, sleep, play, study. After all, the Memphis Gallery is almost like a house, being organised by rooms and located in a typically Milanese residential building in the heart of Brera: the new set up emphasises the domestic aspect of the space and makes it radical through the use of the brand's objects and furnishings that we are used to seeing more as symbols than for their function.
The exhibition aims to investigate what it means to use these objects and to see them used, analysing what it means to adhere to this different philosophy of living. For example, Carlton is always shown without books, the question that 'LIVIN' MEMPHIS' raises is: what happens if we put books on it? The answer is that it is a beautiful bookcase, which finds its completion precisely in its function and in this way fully reveals its true nature.
“There is no question that Memphis has made the design history, books talk about it and pieces are exhibited in the collections of the most important museums in the world. This historical identity has led Memphis pieces to be considered collector's items, works of art admired with respect and considered more for their aesthetic value than for their functionality. On the contrary, Memphis objects are first and foremost furniture and accessories for the home, and should be used. The original idea that Ettore Sottsass and the other members of the group were based on was to respond to functionalist design by creating more joyful objects that could enter everyone's homes. I think this exhibition can help change people's perception of Memphis objects and also appreciate them for what they are, furniture.” - continues Charley Vezza, CEO of Memphis - “This is the third moment of a series of exhibitions in which objects dialogue with the gallery's guests, in an ever-changing, dynamic and interactive way, with sound, video and movement, it could be defined as a sort of lived Memphis, hence the idea for the name: LIVIN' MEMPHIS”
NOTES FOR THE EDITORS
‘LIVIN’ IN MEMPHIS’
Exhibition opened from Thursday 11 to Sunday 21 April 2024
Memphis Milano Galleria
Largo Treves, 5
20121 Milan
Opening hours:
Monday - Sunday
10.00 - 20.00
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CAMRON GLOBAL