Objects as Metaphors:
In the world of Museum Market, each piece seems to possess its own spirit, as if animated by a will to exist beyond mere function.
The Cleome Spinosa chest of drawers (1993) vividly embodies this philosophy. With its glossy surfaces, impressionist-inspired paint touches, and silver horns, the piece materializes a symbolic language akin to shamanic design. The materials – lacquered wood, laminate, silver metallic details – are treated like pigments on a canvas. While retaining its role as a storage piece, it becomes a character. It gazes at us, reflects our image back. As is often the case in Alessandro Mendini’s work, the aim is not merely to design, but to tell a story.
The same is true for the Iris Sibirica table (1993). Taking inspiration from a noble, silent flower, the table also seems to draw its solemnity from a Hellenic altar. Its geometric silhouette is softened by a lush chromatic treatment: painted wood, silkscreened patterns, bold contrasts. Where modernism would have erased all ornament, Alessandro Mendini loads his object with fragments of styles and eras.
Thus, the Iris Sibirica table becomes more than just a surface. It becomes a stage, where gesture and memory engage in dialogue.
Museum Market Series: A Dreamlike World at the Heart of Neo-Modern Design
Alessandro Mendini was never just a designer. He is one of those rare artists who, beyond creating objects, sought to open up entire worlds. For over thirty years, his work has been a quest for images, a kind of journey through the formal and poetic languages of design. Embracing transformation as his guiding principle, Alessandro Mendini emerges as one of the great alchemists of design.
The Museum Market series, conceived in 1993 and produced by Design Gallery Milano, fits squarely within this vision. Through this collection, Alessandro Mendini transforms simple pieces of furniture into dazzling works, fusing styles and eras in an almost spiritual approach. To bring this adventure to life, he collaborated with the brothers Giorgio and Bruno Gregori, craftsmen and partners in this formal odyssey.
Museum Market is more than a collection. Like a chromatic waltz made of diverse shapes and patterns, it resembles a market filled with extraordinary objects. Indeed, Museum Market was imagined as a kind of echo of the artworks one might find in the boutique of a fictional museum, each piece framed by references. While each object refers to a particular era within the vast epic of art and design history, the entire collection stands as a work of art, a message, a poem, and an architectural project all at once.
Fascination, Fascination:
Alessandro Mendini’s aesthetic intentionally saturated, baroque, and expressive, stands in direct opposition to modernism. Where others embrace neutrality, Alessandro Mendini chooses color, letting it overflow. He championed a spiritual visual narrative and pursued that ambition throughout his life.
His furniture is moving not because it is practical, but because it is emotional, humorous, and subtly mystical. Each piece seems to hold a personality, a unique syntax within the grand visual alphabet Mendini constructed. In the Museum Market collection, flower names help convey the sacred energy infused in these objects.
Previously explored in the Ollo series (1987), each piece of furniture becomes the motif of a poem the artist seeks to teach us.
This collection was never meant to furnish standardized apartments. It is destined for exceptional spaces or collectors capable of hearing the strange song of these inhabited objects.
Through this market of forms and dreams, Alessandro Mendini offers us a grammar of the imagination, a world where the object becomes a fable.
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