Ebonized Walnut Chiavarine Eclectic Chairs by Carlo Mollino, 1930s, Set of 2

Pair of chairs attributed to the great Futurist designer Carlo Mollino, who began his career as an interior designer and designer in the 1940s.

The furnishings, often produced in single pieces or in limited series, with a decidedly unique aesthetic novelty, blend the use of artisan construction techniques with the experimentation of new materials and new technologies, such as curved plywood in overlapping layers.

In particular, the technique of ‘cold’ bending of plywood made his chairs, tables and armchairs famous in the early 1950s.
The resulting aesthetic is not directly attributable to any artistic current, just as it is certainly wrong to place Mollino’s work in an exclusively Futurist context.

Carlo Mollino drew from his passions such as skiing, aviation, to reproduce some forms in architecture and interior design, proposing highly innovative forms that were not replicable on an industrial scale: the “Reale” table (1949), of aeronautical derivation, as well as the “Cadma” lamp (1947), which recalls the shape of a propeller, and the “Gilda” armchair (1947), which anticipates the hi-tech taste. In almost all of his works, his interest in speed and movement shines through. His furnishings are recognizable above all for the almost erotic sinuous lines that clearly evoke the female body, which the artist loved to photograph, having chosen to lead a life in which his passions were constantly involved in his work.

The creative figure of him was constantly outside the box so much that he earned the nickname of “designer without industry”.

Deeply fascinated by nature, Mollino re-proposed its forms within his own artistic production, reworking them with extreme skill and mixing them with elements of Modernism, Art Nouveau, Surrealism, Baroque and Rococo.

In 1963, on the occasion of New Year’s Eve, Carlo Mollino created the walking dragon, a sculpture in pleated paper decorated by himself. The different specimens equipped with a spool for thread and an instruction booklet for use are all numbered and titled.