Tomorrow, Chicago’s Wright House, the premier auction house of modern and contemporary design, is hosting “Important Design,” its bi-annual auction of the last centuries’ rare gems. For the occasion, Italian manufacturing power house Cassina has done a rare thing and opened its archives, relinquising a few treasured pieces by Italian design deities to hungry bidders.
Gaetano Pesce's long and illustrious relationship with Cassina produced fabulously eccentric creations; there was the Feltri Chair in 1986, a wool and polyester seat with a strong resemblance to a sleeping bag offering a welcoming hug, and the 1983 New York Sunset, a sofa with cushions colored to look like twilight over the city skyline. Pesce's largest collaboration with Cassina was the 2011 Sessantuna collection, a set of 61 irregularly-shaped, tricolored tables celebrating the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. Arranged together, the tables, manufactured from resin with legs that could be individually manipulated and rearranged, form the country’s unique shape, including land, sea, and islands. The pieces were auctioned by Phillips de Pury in 2011 so that unified Italy could be “fragmented all around the globe,” Pesce said, but one of two completely finished prototypes for the series is going up on the auction block tomorrow.
Would-be owners can also look forward to Pesce’s molded polyurethane Dalila 2 Chair and Dalila 3 Armchair, as well as his bizarre Golgotha Chair, a synthetic polyester-filled and resin-soaked fiberglass cloth suspended on a wire framework with a strange, lacquered dishrag look that also sits in MoMA's permanent design collection. Although Mario Bellini’s Teneride Chair, a single piece of black polyurethane molded into what looks like an accordion tube bent for sitters to nestle into, was too difficult to construct to go into production, bidders will have a chance to take the prototype home. And the 14th of the venerated Alessandro Mendini’s edition of 20 spare but striking Terra chairs will have bidders chomping at the bit.
To see the Cassina works going up for auction during “Important Design,” click the slide show. The auction takes place tomorrow.