META MEMPHIS 1989/1991

While the creative experience of the Memphis group came to an end in the late 1980s, the entrepreneurial and productive activity of the Memphis company continues.

1989 saw the launch of the Meta Memphis collection, an innovative experiment that involved no longer designers, but internationally renowned artists engaged for the first time in the design of objects and furniture.

Inspired by the Greek word metamorphosis (transformation), the collection rethinks the ways and archetypes of living sedimented in the collective memory through conceptual reappraisals and unusual formal, material, and functional associations.

Alighiero Boetti handwrites the hours on the Orogio wall clock in italics, making it illegible. Pier Paolo Calzolari deconstructs furnishings by mixing incongruous materials and transforming them into surprising objects. Sandro Chia transforms a stuffed chair and a table into monumental sculptures, creating them in bronze. Joseph Kosuth covers a psychoanalytic sofa bed with a fabric that reproduces the frontispiece of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Michelangelo Pistoletto hones down a piece of furniture to its outline, to the point of making it unusable. Franz West creates poetic and unstable pieces using recycled metal materials: the iron rod chair or the stiffened chain lamp. We also find Mimmo Paladino, Maurizio Mochetti, Susana Solano, and Lawrence Weiner.

The second and final collection, in 1991, further explored the themes elaborated in the previous experience. Alighiero Boetti, Franz West, Joseph Kosuth, Mimmo Paladino, Lawrence Weiner, Marco Bagnoli, Mathis Esterházy, Sol LeWitt, Bill Woodrow, and Gerhard Merz featured once again in the project, demonstrating that the linguistic and expressive boundaries of industrial design can be questioned.