MILAN.- La Triennale di Milano is presenting the exhibition Unique and Repeatable. Art and the Industrial in the collections of Massimo De Carlo, an exploration of the relationship between art works and serial artefacts.

The exhibition presents more than 100 works and enthralling objects that the gallerist has privately collected, with passion and dedication, during his travels around the globe. The three collections that De Carlo has chosen to showcase embody a unique narrative that traces the history and culture of the 20th century and contribute to create new relationships between art disciplines and production systems of designers and artists.

Unique and Repeatable investigates the connections between art and industry, highlighting the reciprocal relationship that exists between work of art and serial artefacts. The exhibition brings together an enticing series of Weimar Republic ceramics produced before the Second World War, Alighiero Boetti’s iconic embroidered text works, and the posters created between the 1960’s and 1990’s by the Italian graphic designer AG Fronzoni. Each collection creates a narrative that encompasses how art and taste have embraced the industrial world and vice versa: the viewer, as Massimo De Carlo himself has done whilst creating these collections, is asked to reflect on the significance of the word unique and on what the notion and act of collecting actually means.

Massimo De Carlo started collecting Weimar Republic ceramics 20 years ago, whilst strolling through a flea market in Berlin: what made him decide to investigate and collect throughout the years these objects is their extraordinary epithet of the serial artefact. Each object is decorated using stencils and spraypainting, a combination of Art Deco aesthetics and mechanical labour; they constitute the first historical example of a product decorated with geometrical abstractions conceived for mass distribution, that are embeded into the Bauhaus ceramic school of the first Weimar Republic.

Alighiero Boetti’s iconic embroidery works bring together ancient artisanal sewing techniques and a profound reflection on authorship. These works were designed by the artist and subsequently handmade by Afghan artisans, becoming a symbol of Boetti’s reflection on life and art. The works displayed in the exhibition are just a selection of Massimo De Carlo’s much larger collection of embroidered works by Boetti that the gallerist started collecting 30 years ago.

AG Fronzoni’s posters – which he created to promote exhibitions, cultural events and political gatherings – are characterized by the dynamic tensions created by the relationship between emptiness and wholeness and a unique use of typographic fonts and colour. The distinct, sharp graphics of Fronzoni reflect the designers fascinating philosophy that rebukes all things unnecessary, superfluous and excessive in favour of a rigid, moral and ethic sense of aesthetics.

These three very different body of works are installed in the spaces of La Triennale, where the architect Matilde Cassani has created an installation that allows the works to communicate with each other and highlights the narrative and sentimental value of these objects that are representations of a passion that goes beyond professional, cultural and geographical boundaries.