Enzo Mari

Enzo Mari (1932-2020) was for more than half a century one of the most important counter-current voices in the panorama of Italian design. Contrary to many other great designers of his generation, who were primarily architects, Mari came to design from the world of art. In fact, in his youth he was an important exponent of the Kinetic Art movement, from which he recovers the idea that the user - of a work or of a project - must not limit himself to passively accept what the author decided for him, but must do participating in a kind of co-creation. Hence his attention to the world of toys and the creation of unusual performance products such as his Proposal for a self-design, which involves the buyer in the assembly and creation of the furniture. Even his most conventional projects reveal themselves to be supported by a strong ideological structure, permeated with a rigorous simplicity of an almost Franciscan matrix. Among his most important collaborations, those with the Milanese company Danese, which accompanied his first steps as a designer, and with brands such as Zanotta and Driade.