Smiling Objects

“If I make vases, I can give them eyes or a mouth, make them smile. The object must be enriched with a bit of commedia dell’arte. It has to create a level of attention that makes a person want to engage with it,” Alessandro Mendini said in a beautiful interview ten years ago. And in fact, that sentence already contains everything: the vision, the irony, the rejection of neutral, silent design. For Mendini, the object was never merely a matter of function or style, but a narrative, an emotional presence, a relationship. A body capable of looking at whoever looks at it, of smiling, of unsettling the observer’s certainties. His profoundly human, narrative, even theatrical idea of design—one that runs throughout his entire body of work—returns powerfully in the major exhibition “Alessandro Mendini”, on view from January 16 to May 10 at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London.

An architect, designer, artist, theorist, and editorial director, Mendini was one of the most complex and influential figures in postwar Italian design. Born in Milan in 1931, he moved through radical design, postmodernism, and the critique of modernism without ever fully subscribing to a single label. Rather, he used design as a tool for cultural reflection, constantly questioning the role of the object, taste, and function in contemporary society. The London exhibition—the first solo show in the United Kingdom dedicated to him—captures this complexity through around fifty works ranging from furniture to drawings, paintings, carpets, and design objects. It is not a simple chronological retrospective, but a layered narrative that highlights the playful, poetic, and intellectually rigorous nature of his work, as well as his iconic collaborations with companies such as Alessi and Swatch.
 

A significant section of the exhibition is devoted to the dialogue that the designer—who graduated in Architecture from the Politecnico di Milano in 1959—established with art history and the twentieth-century avant-gardes. From Futurism, whose utopian ambition to merge art and life he shared, to Kandinsky and Malevich, his works never quote reverentially but instead reinterpret, transform, and subvert. Emblematic in this sense is the celebrated Proust Armchair, a neo-baroque piece infused with pointillist color that has become one of the most recognizable symbols of Italian design. “That armchair is nothing and everything. I made it in 1978. It was not a design object, it was not literature, it was not painting. At the same time, it was all of these things. Therefore, an ambiguous object. Thought rather than designed. I placed a faux eighteenth-century armchair in a meadow by Signac,” Mendini recounted in the interview mentioned above.

Alongside his best-known objects, the exhibition brings to the fore a perhaps even more revealing dimension: the anthropomorphic and narrative one. The famous corkscrews Anna G. and Alessandro M., designed for Alessi, perfectly embody his philosophy of “treating objects as if they were human beings.” Faces, expressions, personalities: for Mendini, even industrial design can—and must—tell a story. Rereading Mendini today means remembering that design can also be a cultural stance, a narrative, irony, emotion. That an object can smile, look back, unsettle. And that design, when it truly is such, does not merely occupy space, but inhabits it, establishing a living relationship with those who encounter it.