Enzo Mari

In the late 1950s Mari entered the orbit of the Milanese avant-garde, joining the Arte Programmata movement alongside Bruno Munari and participating in kinetic and optical art exhibitions. At the same time he began his long collaboration with Danese Milano, producing a sequence of objects that have become touchstones of postwar Italian design: the Putrella tray (1958), a section of industrial steel I-beam bent at each end into a vessel of absolute economy; the wooden puzzle '16 Animali' (1957), sixteen interlocking animal silhouettes cut from a single rectangle of oak; and the Timor perpetual calendar (1966), a set of graphic plastic cards pivoting on a central axis, inspired by railway departure boards.

Mari's relationship with industry was always adversarial as much as collaborative. He designed prolifically for Artemide, Alessi, Zanotta, Driade, and Magis while simultaneously insisting that the system manufacturing those objects was structurally incapable of serving ordinary people. The critique reached its most direct expression in 'Autoprogettazione' (1974), a book of construction drawings for nineteen pieces of furniture built from rough boards and nails, which Mari distributed free of charge. The project asked anyone with basic tools to make their own chair, table, or bed, and it argued that knowledge of how things are made is itself a political good. Decades later, IKEA's interpretation of the project into the 'Fröjda' collection returned it to the mass market in a way that Mari found philosophically ambiguous.

For Zanotta he designed the Tonietta chair (1985), a reinterpretation of Thonet's bent-wood language in aluminium and steel, which won the Compasso d'Oro in 1987. Over his career Mari received the Compasso d'Oro five times, in 1967, 1979, 1989, 2001, and 2011, a record that reflects both his productivity and the consistency of his thinking. In 2002, the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano awarded him an honorary degree in industrial design.

Mari's work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Triennale di Milano, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. A major retrospective at the Triennale in 2020, titled 'Enzo Mari curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli,' opened weeks before his death and gathered the full span of his practice. He died on 19 October 2020 in Milan, aged 88, from complications related to COVID-19. He had spent nearly seven decades insisting that design without a social purpose is simply decoration.