“Dolce Vita, Modern Italian Design, Art & Fashion in the French Riviera”

The exhibition presents 3 disciplines that have in common the desire of liberty, of expression and of creativity. After the exhibition “The Dolce Vita, from Liberty to Italian Design, 1900-1940” organized at the Musée d’Orsay in 2015, arrives in Monaco «Dolce Vita, Modern Italian Design, Art & Fashion in the French Riviera»

Gathering the most beautiful pieces of design by the biggest Italian maestro in one exhibition will be the way to pay tribute to the Dolce Vita years.

Gate 5 Gallery explores the creativity and the freedom of expression from 1940 to the late 60s.

The exhibition will be organized as a staging of interiors, representing the Italian taste in the 50s.

In the fashion field, Gate 5 shows creations by Valentino, the Fontana sisters, Emilio Pucci, and Fernanda Gattinoni. Thanks to Princess Caroline of Monaco, we present dresses from Grace Kelly’s wardrobe, created by the most popular italian stylists of that time.

The after war is characterized by the birth of the biggest companies, in the furniture field, that created “solidarity pacts” with the industrial drawers, not called designers yet.

The first ones to enter that professional pattern come from the architecture world: Gio Ponti, BBPR, Franco Albini. They all agreed to say that design, compared to the architecture, is not politically controlled and hence does not have limits: it is free of creativity. In that context, the designers rethink every daily objects “from the spoon to the city”. It is an important characteristic that defines the italian design: the designers were orginially architects.

In the field of art, the group of 8 gathered in 1952 under the label “abstract-concret”: “They are not and do not want to be realists; They suggest to exit that antinomy that on one hand threats to transform the abstraction into a renewed mannerism, and on the other hand obeys to political orders that desintegrate the liberty and the creative spontaneity”. That definition becomes clearer with the Biennial of 1954, a big words agitation can be observed around a real phenomenon: the expression of different sensitivities devastated by the disasters of the war. On one hand the burning intuition of the Spatialism by Fontana, on the other hand the chaos solemnly organized by Burri.