What is Modern? and Olivetti: Innovation and Identity
through November 30 '11
Denver Art Museum
Over the coming months Denver Art Museum is hosting two complimentary exhibitions exploring modern design, celebrating both it's history and legacy today.
'What Is Modern?' presents the evolution of Modern Design from the early 1800s to the present day, through a narrative objects including furniture, industrial, and graphic design. The show presents a trajectory of thinking and a variety of methods, materials, and concepts exploring the ways in which design has expressed the modern experience.
Curator Darrin Alfred explains "In its simplest form, the term modern implies the up-to-date, a current development, or, better still, a spirit in step with its own time...this concept could be applied to a 200-year-old innovation still in use today, such as the steaming of wood, bending it, and letting it harden into curved shapes or patterns. It could also apply to works by today’s emerging designers.”
The companion exhibition, Olivetti: Invention and Identity, presents the company's excellence in communication design, as well as it's innovative product designs. The show demonstrates the role Olivetti played, through it's designs, in helping to establish Italy’s reputation as the cradle of modern design in the postwar period.
'School of Seven Bells/Black Moth Super Rainbow' screen print, 2009, Jason Munn
'Mayday Lamp', 1999, Konstantin Grcic
'Roadrunner Chair', 2006, by DoubleButter
Giovanni Pintori, Olivetti Lexikon Elettrica, 1936. Gift & Giovanni Pintori, Olivetti Lettera 22, 1950
Divisumma 18 calculator designed in 1972 by Mario Bellini for Olivetti
