La mostra "Ettore Sottsass: un designer italiano" alla Biennale di Venezia del 1976 : Un’opera deduttiva, variata, sintetica

The article deals with the many exhibition design interventions of Ettore Sottsass for the 1976 edition of Venice Biennale, with a specific focus on the first Italian solo review contextually dedicated to the designer in the Napoleonic wing of Palazzo Correr: the exhibition Ettore Sottsass: un designer italiano, produced by the Biennale in collaboration with the International Design Zentrum in Berlin and other partners, was curated by François Burkhardt together with Sottsass himself; the setting up was signed by the latter together with his Finnish collaborator Ulla Salovaara; the presentation text in the catalogue was by Alessandro Mendini. The exhibition, consisting mainly of drawings and photographs, but also of furniture and glass or ceramics objects, exhaustively documented Sottsass’s diversified activity as an artist and as a designer at that time. It presented the Olivetti production as well as those for Poltronova and Bitossi, the Italian companies that had given the designer the greatest professional opportunities in the previous twenty years. The choice of a first retrospective event extremely rich in terms of project typologies, is an element that distinguishes it within the logic of design exhibitions. The neoclassical setting of Palazzo Correr represents both a cultured pre-existence and a complex and problematic palimpsest to harmonize with what is presented. The article, based on mainly unpublished sources, aims to analyse Sottsass’s presence at 1976 Biennale and to investigate how Sottsass’s all-round activity coincided not only with the construction of products or settings but also with the development of a fertile and peculiar creative process.