A large monochrome box in the color blue that is immediately associated with the Cappellini brand. This is the silent, enveloping setting for the works by Jasper Morrison. Spazio Cappellini, at Via Borgogna 8 in Milan, becomes a theater to present the major retrospective organized by the company about the English designer, to celebrate 35 years of mutual friendship and collaboration. The show is part of a series of narratives on living which Cappellini produces in its showroom to investigate the great contemporary creative talents discovered by Giulio Cappellini, designers who have taken part in a profound relationship with the brand. Jasper Morrison is undoubtedly one of them.
After taking a degree at the Royal College of Art of London and opening his own studio in that city in 1986, Morrison began to work with Cappellini, an encounter that over the years has brought exceptional results thanks to “intellectual affinities regarding visual language, a shared vision and a similar type of determination,” the company comments.
The visible outcome of this relationship of shared intentions is represented by a multitude of products and icons now on view at Spazio Cappellini, freely arranged to create a pathway between past and present. Furnishings of great rigor, simplicity and elegance, like the Thinking Man’s Chair that can be traced back to Morrison’s early years, and the One Legged Table, a manifesto of the rebirth of Minimal Design. These are followed by Elan, the first sofa perched on slender legs without central supports, and Low Pad, the first family of seating with printed fabric or leather on the structure. All these projects share a forceful attitude of experimentalism.
The exhibit itinerary continues with Lotus, the collection that disrupts the rules of hyper-tech office seating, Oblong, the first deconstructed sofa that became the forerunner of a long series of products, and Orla, a contemporary reinterpretation of the curved armchairs of the 1950s.
