Ada and Cesare Minola, Turin, 1944-1946
Thence by descent to the present owners
'Carlo Mollino: Arabesques', Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, 20 September 2006-7 January 2007
'Esperienze formali nell'arredamento', Domus, no. 227, August 1948, illustrated pp. 12-13
Fulvio Ferrari, Carlo Mollino: Cronaca, exh. cat., Galleria Fulvio Ferrari, Turin, 1985, illustrated pp. 88, 93
Giovanni Brino, Carlo Mollino: Architettura come autobiografia, Milan, 1987, illustrated p. 97
François Burkhardt and Claude Eveno, eds., L’étrange univers de l’architecte Carlo Mollino, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1989, illustrated p. 111
Roberto Gabetti and Fulvio Irace, Carlo Mollino 1905-1973, Turin, 1989, illustrated pp. 186-87
Rossella Colombari, Carlo Mollino: Catalogo del mobili–Furniture Catalogue, Milan, 2005, illustrated p. 32
Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, The Furniture of Carlo Mollino, New York, 2006, illustrated pp. 120, 222
Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, eds., Carlo Mollino: Arabesques, exh. cat., Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Milan, 2007, illustrated p. 70
Italian • 1905 - 1973
Carlo Mollino made sexy furniture. His style may have grown out of the whiplash curves of Art Nouveau, but the sinuous lines of his furniture were more humanoid than vegetal, evoking arched backs and other body parts. Mollino was also an avid aviator, skier and racecar driver — he designed his own car for Le Mans. His love of speed and danger comes across in his designs, which MoMA curator Paola Antonelli has described as having "frisson."
Mollino had no interest in industrial design and the attendant constraints of material costs and packaging. His independent wealth allowed him to pick and choose projects, resulting in an oeuvre of unique, often site-specific works that were mostly executed by the Turin joinery firm Apelli & Varesio. Apart from a coffee table that he designed in 1950 for the American company Singer & Sons, his furniture never went into production. Notwithstanding the support of Gio Ponti, Mollino's design contemporaries largely dismissed him as an eccentric outsider. However, the combination of scarcity (Mollino only made several hundred works in his lifetime), exquisite craftsmanship and idiosyncratic "frisson" has rightly placed Carlo Mollino in the highest tier of twentieth-century design collecting.
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