Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed – Opening at 10 Corso Como Gallery, Milan

Milan, December 12th, 2024 – 10 Corso Como dedicates an exhibition to the Italian architect, designer, historian, and theorist Andrea Branzi, one year after his passing, celebrating his radical vision and works. Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed, curated by Alessio de’ Navasques, will be set up at the 10 Corso Como Gallery from December 18th, 2024, to February 16th, 2025.

Awarded with three Compasso d’Oro, one of which dedicated to his career, Branzi was a multifaceted and radical figure, the author of a forward-looking approach that crossed applied arts, domestic and urban space with an unprecedented sensitivity: a ‘poetic habitat’ and interdisciplinary that the exhibition focuses on starting with the series of gold and silver jewelry, Silver & Gold, and silver and birch wood objects, Silver & Wood, made in Belgium in the second half of the 1990s and collected in a retrospective exhibition at the Ghent Design Museum in 1998.

The exhibition dedicated to Branzi is part of a path of study and reinterpretation – through the archives of artists and designers – of the applied arts, and in particular of a reconnaissance around jewelry and the concept of ornament as a cultural figure, within the artistic programme of 10 Corso Como, which began with the exhibition Pietro Consagra. Ornamenti.

Staged in collaboration with Nicoletta Morozzi and Lorenza Branzi as well as Casa Argentaurum and Friedman Benda galleries, Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed is presented in an itinerary that lines up and creates a dialogue among works, documents, drawings and photographs. In the bright, wide spaces of the 10 Corso Como Gallery, the installation, conceived as a seamless flow, composes a landscape of objects spanning a period from the mid-1980s to the latest creations of 2023.

At the heart of the exhibition are the jewels, gold and silver garlands, crowns and necklaces that ‘adorn the human body in a landscape, heightening its aura with leaves and natural elements and highlighting that mystical dimension of ornamentation in its primordial meaning as a means to bring humans closer to the divine,’ as Alessio de’ Navasques writes in the text accompanying the exhibition. The title of the exhibition recalls an assumption by Branzi appeared in an article published in the magazine Interni in November 2005: “if there have been societies without cities and architecture, there have never been societies without jewelry; because they are, above all, the obvious sign of a magical elaboration of the human being, and the symbol of the search for a secret order in the laws of the cosmos.”.

This desire to overcome a certain rigidity and self-referentiality of modern architecture and design runs through Branzi’s thinking. Its implementation is realised by the hybridising with natural elements, an operation of symbolic re-signification that extends from applied arts to furniture, lamps and monumental scale projects.

The exhibition reconstructs the special relationship woven with Belgium between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, with private and institutional commissions, through the hybrid objects of the Wood & Stones series – boxes and sculptural lamps -, in which the use of wood and stone seems intended to heal the distance between science and nature, to the silver objects of the Silver & Wood series in which the elements of the traditional tea service are translated into linear forms with intersections of branches and plant fragments. It is again the purity of the silver weavings of baskets and containers that evoke archaic and symbolic forms, with references to Shaker culture. The monumental installation of the Grande Vaso in Ghent in 1999 is traced through documentation and prototypes.

Highlighting the lines of continuity in the designer’s incessant and all-encompassing reflection on the tension between modernity and nature, the exhibition includes original examples of the famous seating series Domestic Animals – conceived in the mid-1980s – in dialogue with the more recent series Stones 2A – already part of the Trees & Stones exhibition at the Friedman Benda gallery in New York in 2012, where trunks and stones as elements of a prehuman archaeology relate to industrial materials – and Germinal Bench of 2022, in which the use of bamboo canes, compared by Branzi to a forest of organ pipes, reverberates the concept of nature as a form of infinite architecture.

One year after his passing, the 10 Corso Como Gallery dedicates an exhibition to Andrea Branzi’s production of jewelry and objects in silver and gold, inviting visitors to experience the radical mindset of the Italian architect, designer and theorist.

The cultural programming of 10 Corso Como, started within the Rethinking 10 Corso Como project, animates the Gallery location, making it an arena of dialogue between different arts and a meeting ground for new experiences. The new 10 Corso Como follows the imprint desired by Tiziana Fausti, by presenting itself as an inclusive platform for exchange.

Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed
Curated by Alessio de’ Navasques
10 Corso Como Gallery
18.12.24 – 16.02.25
Every day: 10.30am – 7.30pm
Free entrance

For further information:

Michelle DiLello, Blue Medium
[email protected]

10·Corso·Como Press Office
[email protected]

Andrea Branzi, 1938-2023

Architect and designer, born and graduated in Florence; he has lived and worked in Milan since 1974. Since his graduation (1966) he has participated to the vanguard movement of “Radical Architecture”, and his designs are today in the permanent collection of Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione, Parma, and of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. He has been active in the fields of architecture, industrial and experimental design, urban planning, education and cultural promotion. Author of many books and essays about design, published in different countries, as well as books about his work have been published at international level. He has received three Compasso d’Oro awards, one of which dedicated to his career. In 1982 he has founded and directed Domus Academy, first post-graduate school of design, and until 2009 he has held a chair and been the President of the Interior Design Course at Politecnico di Milano. Branzi has been the editor of MODO magazine from 1982 to 1984 and has been a member of the National council of Design at the Italian Ministry of Culture. As a Scientific Curator of the new Design Museum of Triennale di Milano, he has curated its two first exhibitions. In 2008 he has received the Honoris Causa Graduation at the Università della Sapienza in Rome and nominated Honoray Member of Royal Design for Industry in London. In 2018 he has been one of the Laureates of the Rolf Schock Prize for Visual Arts at the Royal Academy of Sweden. He has given conferences in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, United States, Brasil, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.

10·Corso·Como

Founded in Milan in 1991, 10·Corso·Como devises and promotes the concept of bringing together culture and the latest trends, fostering a connection between the worlds of fashion, design and food. Regarded as the world’s first concept store, it transformed retail into a fusion of lifestyle and culture. With Tiziana Fausti’s leadership and business ability, 10·Corso·Como is now taking full advantage of its evolution into a brand that symbolises Milan, Made in Italy and international creativity. www.10corsocomo.com #10CorsoComo

Image caption: Top: Andrea Branzi, Tree 1B, 2011. Birch and patinated aluminum, 68 x 150 x 23.5 inches /172.7 x 381 x 59.7 cm. Edition of 12. Left: Germinal Bench, 2022 (detail). Hand painted bamboo, painted aluminum, 41 x 90.5 x 23.5 inches/ 104 x 230 x 60 cm. Unique, from a series of 12. Right: Lamp, 2014. Japanese rice paper, bamboo, marble, 88 x 30 x 30 inches / 224 x 76 x 76 cm. Edition of 12.