Chairs from the Collection

Bruno Munari was an artist, a Futurist and Modernist painter, an inventor, and designer who made a significant contribution with his extraordinary work, which makes connections between playfulness, creativity, art and design, and the dialogue between them. Munari’s art and design pieces, Useless Machines, X-Hour, Direct Projection, Flexi, and Chair for Short Visits, attest to an exceptional designer who possessed the thinking skills of a child and a philosophical worldview holding that “progress means simplifying, not complicating”. In the course of his life Munari discovered the secrets of children’s thinking and creativity, and adopted them for himself; simple, almost naןve thinking, ceaselessly asking questions, and especially the secret of observing things from multiple and impossible angles.

Beppe Finessi, curator of Infinite Insight (Milan, 1999), described Munari as a genius, child, philosopher, and a teacher who simultaneously learns from life and creates it.

Saper Vedere, knowing how to see, is a statement that typifies Munari’s philosophy, whereby he invites us to observe the world around us. His book, Drawing A Tree, his Zodiacali jewelry in the form of the constellations representing each sign of the zodiac, his book Good Design that describes design from the perspective of a rose, an orange, and an apple, and many of his other works tell us how Munari translates observation of the world into primary, surprising, and thought-provoking design. Amazingly, this thinking, which was relevant in the 1960s and 70s, is still relevant in the next millennium.

Designers: 

Dror Ben Shetrit / Martin Mostbock / Ron Arad / Shir Atar / Konstantin Grcic / Ezri Tarazi / Yoav Reches / Yaacov Kaufman / Sahar Batsry / Stefan Diez / Adital Ela / Heatherwick Studio / Flux Chair