Wright Auction

Shown at the XVII Milan Triennale's special exhibition Le Affinità Elettive (“The Elective Affinities”) in 1985, the present work was designed by Alessandro Mendini in collaboration with Studio Alchimia founder Giorgio Gregori. As its title suggests, the exhibition invited renowned designers from an international pool—including Ettore Sottsass, Robert Venturi, and Michael Graves—to more deeply pursue their own interests and affinities. For Mendini, this presented an opportunity to critique both the deification of designers and what he deemed “the paradox of mass avant-garde.” Superbly crafted and unique, this cabinet nonetheless contains patterns of inlaid wood that are drawn from the designer's “Mendinigraph,” an adaptable tool that other designers might employ to formulate and re-formulate series of “avant-garde” forms.

With this nod to the tension between invention and repetition, the cabinet featured prominently in Mendini's showcase, a tableaux which he titled Black-Out: indeed, it was placed just to the side of a hyperrealistic wax model of the designer himself for a complex commentary on authorship, aesthetics, and production. As Mendini wrote for Artforum on the occasion of many of the Le Affinità Elettive designs being brought to auction, “[A]ll this leads us to the beginnings of a deeply reflective phase of design, a reconsideration on esthetic grounds of the morality of production. Here one can dream of a vast new design horizon waiting to be explored.”