ArtistItalian
Gastone Rinaldi
1 active items
Gastone Rinaldi was born on 16 November 1920 in Padua, into a family already deep in metal furniture manufacturing. His father Mario had founded RIMA - Riunione Industrie Metallurgiche Affini - in 1916, building it into a Padua-based producer of metal furniture. Gastone studied economics, but sport occupied much of his attention alongside business: he played football professionally with Cremona and entered the Mille Miglia car race. When he and his brother Giorgio took over RIMA in 1948, the company was a functional manufacturer with little design ambition.
What followed was a rapid repositioning. Rinaldi met Gio Ponti around 1950 and the encounter opened connections to Milan's design circles. His first major pieces for RIMA appeared at the IX Milan Triennale in 1950, where the DU10 and DU11 chairs were shown in the Hospital Section - tubular steel frames suited to institutional requirements but designed with the proportional care of domestic furniture. The DU30 chair followed in 1954 and won the Compasso d'Oro that year, Italy's highest design honour. The chair's tubular steel structure and careful integration of seat and back made it a reference point for postwar Italian metal seating.
The DU41 armchair won the Silver Medal at the XI Triennale in 1957. That same period produced the Saturno sofa, a crossbow-shaped metal frame design from around 1958 that entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - an unusual institutional recognition for a manufacturer outside the Milan-Rome axis. RIMA under Rinaldi attracted collaborations from some of the most active designers of the era: Franco Albini, Carlo Mollino, Ico Parisi, Gio Ponti, Alberto Rosselli, Ettore Sottsass, and Marco Zanuso all worked with the company.
Internal tensions at RIMA led Rinaldi to leave in 1974 and establish a new company, Thema, in Limena near Padua. There he continued designing chairs, and two pieces from this period - the Arianna armchair and the Dafne folding chair - received Compasso d'Oro nominations in 1978 and 1981 respectively. Thema closed in 1989, and Rinaldi died in Padua on 2 March 2006.
At auction, Rinaldi's work appears mainly in the secondary market for Italian midcentury furniture. His pieces surface at Stockholms Auktionsverk's German rooms and at Pandolfini Casa d'Aste in Italy. Sets of his cantilever dining chairs have traded around 5,800 SEK in the Swedish market, with individual pieces and smaller sets ranging between 200 and 1,200 SEK. The market for his chairs reflects sustained collector interest in postwar Italian tubular steel design, particularly pieces with documented RIMA provenance.