Memphis & Gufram

Memphis & Gufram

Memphis

The Memphis Group was an Italian design movement founded by Ettore Sottsass in 1981 alongside Michele de Lucchi, Aldo Cibic, Matteo Thun, Marco Zanini, Martine Bedin, Nathalie Du Pasquier, and George Sowden. Active between 1981 and 1988, the Memphis Group defined ‘80s aesthetic and greatly revolutionised the design world.

Memphis sought to rebel against the ‘uniform panorama of good taste’ of the time, where the principle ‘form follows function’ reigned supreme. With Memphis, design has been liberated from rationality, and enters the realm of poetry. Form no longer had to follow function. Design could be loud, colourful, whimsical, with clashing patterns. Objects were liberated from function and instead became a visual object rather than just a tool or piece of furniture.

The pieces shown by the Memphis Group and their international collaborators were shocking: mixing elegance and kitsch, playing with absurd and irrational shapes, using plastic laminates with patterns that simulate precious materials, but most of all it introduced the pleasure of play into the rational language of industrial production. Love it or hate it, it rapidly amassed public and press attention worldwide, and came to define the aesthetics of the ‘80s. More importantly, it expanded the boundaries of design, emphasising the expressive possibilities of design as a vehicle of communication, rather than just one of utilitarian function.

Gufram

Gufram is an Interior Design Italia brand globally known for pushing the limits of industrial design. With its Radical Design spirit and its nonconformist experimentation linked to aesthetic, technological, and material research, Gufram has created seats and interior design icons that have entered collective imagination: playful, subversive, and desecrating products with a POP soul, willingly designed as anti-design items.

Gufram was born in Turin as an artisanal entity, where the craftsmen who were specialized in upholstery, cabinet making, and furniture padding met the artistic and international avant-garde with the goal of giving birth to a new way of understanding modern furniture. Since 1966 Gufram has been producing design icons that have become unique in form and value thanks to the cross-pollination between the industrial design approach, the artisanal creation and the imaginative flair typical of Art. Gufram’s unmistakable furniture items like the lips shaped couch Bocca, the chaise lounge Pratone and the hall tree Cactus, are also known as Domestic Sculptures, the contact point between the art and design worlds. They are now displayed in the most beautiful houses and in the most renowned museums in the world including MoMA (New York), The Met (New York), and Centre Pompidou (Paris).

Today Gufram has once again become an important and influential nonconformist voice; with its unconventional approach it gives birth to new style icons also outside the world of Interior Design, thus contaminating all design fields from fashion to automotive to everything related to contemporary aesthetics.