Richard-Ginori and Gio Ponti in a Laveno collection.
MIDeC – Museo Internazionale Design Ceramico in Laveno Mombello presents from July 15th to October 8th, 2023 the exhibition 100%. A centenary and a hundred pieces: Richard-Ginori and Gio Ponti in a Laveno collection, curated by Anty Pansera, conservator of the Museum, and Giacinta Cavagna of Gualdana, with installation by Ivo Tomasi.
On display will be more than 100 pieces from a private collection in Laveno, signed by Gio Ponti and made for Richard-Ginori. In fact, in 1923, exactly 100 years ago, the partnership between Ponti and the famous manufacturer began when the young Milanese architect became the creative director of Richard-Ginori, helping the company, which was in need of innovation and which led it to become the famous international brand that everyone still knows today.
Ponti successfully exhibited in 1923 at the first Biennial Exhibition of International Decorative Arts in Monza. His pieces with a refined variety of forms and new and novel motifs immediately garnered public and critical recognition. And it’s with some of these pieces that the exhibition begins, celebrating this centennial, and then continues with other works juxtaposed and declined in form, theme and color: all carefully identified and chosen over time by the private collector who generously made them available for the exhibition.
The MIDeC of Laveno Mombello thus pays homage to the history of Richard- Ginori manufactures, which was one of the “sparks” from which the Museum itself was born: in fact, in 1965 the Richard- Ginori merged their company with the SCI – Italian Ceramic Society of Laveno and then left a substantial donation of artifacts that laid the foundation for what is now the Museum, established in 1971 in the 16th-century Perabò Palace.
Gio Ponti never worked for the Italian Ceramic Society, but he always followed with interest the projects and products that were being made on Lake Maggiore. The exhibition is a great opportunity to learn more about the feverish years of creativity and inventiveness of the last century through little-known pieces by Ponti in a context that celebrates ceramic art in all its glory.
At MIDeC also a ceramics and glass fairy tale
Corollary to this exhibition is another exhibition project: A Fairy Tale in Ceramics and Glass: The Dialogues of Margaret (Grasselli) and Pinocchio (Massimo Lunardon), which aims to make people reflect on the relevance of glass, which shares hardness, fragility and transparency with ceramics. Lunardon, a glass master, and Grasselli, a ceramic sculptor, have been working together for some time now, bringing the two materials that characterize their work into dialogue and creating duets, stories in which the protagonists are Pinocchio (Massimo’s) and Margaret (of its namesake), the Butterfly and the Whale.
In the Museum’s first-floor balcony, also by Grasselli there will be a site-specific installation starring her Little Girls, faceless figures from imaginary worlds, deliberately ill-defined but with different expressive gestures so that the viewer can put something of himself in each of them.
Valeria Rastrelli
