Marion Bley

Sculptor, designer, scenographer, architect, landscape architect, Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was a complete artist who intimately linked his art to his life, in all its aspects. Dividing his time between the United States and Japan - his two homelands -, between abstraction and figuration, modernity and tradition, art and design, he worked without ever caring about borders. A leading artist on the post-war international scene, he is best known for his Akari lamps, a brilliant reinterpretation of the Japanese lantern, to which he dedicated a piece of writing - reproduced here - that has all the air of a love letter to the ancient art of Gifu.If his sculptural works now belong to the collections of the world's greatest museums, they also occupy the public space of the cities where they become, for many, terrain for play, meditation, contemplation, in any case, for life.

Architect, designer and photographer, Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) left a profound mark on the international design scene with his unmistakable visual vocabulary, made up of unprecedented combinations of materials and unprejudiced research into colour.After his prolific association with Olivetti, he became an avant-garde icon in the 1980s with the Memphis Group, before devoting himself entirely to architecture. His indispensable freedom, in work as in life, is accompanied by an insatiable curiosity that leads him to explore places and cultures, instilling the same enthusiasm in all his collaborators. A rich introduction by Emmanuel Berard and a self-portrait written and drawn by Sottsass himself, together with photographs and projects, restore the fascinating and restless creative path of a great master of Italian design, still a reference point for new generations.