Object description:
Ettore Sottsass, Jr., has had a long and illustrious career as an internationally renowned architect, designer, and theoretician. A leading figure in Italian design, he is especially noted for his work as a consultant designer for the Olivetti Company, producers of office furniture and typewriters, including the famous red "Valentine" model. His colorful Memphis furniture had a major impact on interior style for over a decade with its stark, eclectic, and irreverent aesthetic, including his bookshelf and the "Carlton" room divider, which became an icon of Postmodern design.
The Memphis designers explored a visual language of bright colors and patterns that echoed the themes and motifs of contemporary industrial and urban iconography. Colors and patterns were often strikingly juxtaposed in direct opposition to the conventions of "good taste" that had characterized mainstream Italian design since the 1950s. Sottsass called plastic laminate "a material with no uncertainties" and celebrated the honesty of the banal associated with the mundane and everyday, such as the printed plastic laminates found in coffee bars and seaside caf?s.
Sottsass's theoretical writing and experiments within the radical design movement in Italy since the mid-1960s - beginning with Global Tools, Studio Alchymia, and the Memphis group - made him an international cultural force, hailed by many as the father of "anti-design." The Israel Museum's collection of his works is one of the largest in any public institution.
