When design becomes art: an Italian journey between utopia and matter – Arte.it

Italy from the second half of the twentieth century is a laboratory in which art and design view each other, challenge each other, confuse. In San Marino, “Art and design. Design is art“This essential dialogue again creates an exhibition that crosses experiments, visions and provocations for half a century. The project, Designed by Philippe Daverio and published by Emma Zanella, Vittoria Broggini and Alessandro Castiglioni, was born in 2009 in the Ma*GA di Gallarate and in 2025 he landed in a new guise for the cultural institutions of San Marino, between Palazzo Sums and the National Gallerycoincide with the twenty years of the design department of the Sammarinese university.

More than a chronological story, the exhibition is an episodic story, a map with ideas that contains the ambiguity of the design – “complex phenomenon” for Daverio – suspended between function, aesthetics, industry and artistic experiments. Four sections guide the visitor on a journey that unites the culture of the project with the social, political and economic tensions that have formed contemporary Italy.

Art and design. Design is art2025, Palazzo Sums – National Gallery, San Marino Cultural Institutes. PH Alessio Pasqualini, thanks to the authors and Museum Ma*GA.

It starts again It evokes the mail -water energy when the strictness of rationalism melts in free geometries and the use of plastic new production and chromatic horizons opens. In the houses of the economic tree, protagonists of When the lounges were white, Essential forms and innovative materials Dialogue with the art of Lucio Fontana and the Bruno Munari lamps, in a game of full and empty that again define the idea of ​​domestic space.

Con From personal freedoms to political freedoms The seventies arrive: energy crisis, social tensions and radical movements lead to the birth of collectives, pedagogical toys and utopian projects such as “metaphors” of Ettore Sottsass. Design becomes a democratic tool, able to be a political manifesto. Finally Milan to drink Four the postmodern exuberance of the 1980s and the nineties, between cultivated quotes, irony and the triumph of Made in Italy that transform everyday objects – such as those of Alessi – into popicones.

The exhibition returns the image of a country that has been able to reinvent itself several times through design and converted the project in Art and Art into the project. A path that speaks to the present and reminds us that real innovation always comes from the meeting, often unpredictable, between aesthetics and daily life.