Starting on 9 November, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome presents the work of Riccardo Dalisi, one of the most multifaceted protagonists of Italian design culture in recent decades. His work, which moves freely between architecture and design, art and pedagogy, theory and activism, academia and social commitment, blossomed in the cultural climate of Naples in the 1960s and 1970s and is the expression of a Mediterranean spirit resistant to a homologising and failing modernity.
At the same time, however, Dalisi has always been nourished by much broader influences, both geographical and disciplinary, which the exhibition curated by Gabriele Neri aims to restore thanks to a large quantity of materials (drawings, sketches, papier-mâché, furniture, design pieces, sculptures, paintings, photographs, documents, installations, films, etc.) from the Dalisi Archive in Naples and many other Italian and foreign archives.
In this narrative, there are some projects born from the collaboration between Dalisi and Zanotta at the end of the 1980s, such as the Pavone chair, the Mariposa bench and the Metopa double headboard, examples of contemporary neo-craftsmanship that lie on the borderline between art and design. Unique pieces, diversified by a detail at the artist's discretion as in the chair or the subject of the sculpture found in the bench. Another project by the author, realised at the beginning of the 1990s in continuity with the poetics of the proceeding ones, will be exhibited within the exhibition: the Giocondo coffee table.
The exhibition is open from November 9, 2023 until March 3, 2024.
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