Unusual conversations. A dialogue between the Landscape Museum and the Alessi Museum

Visual arts, those of the works exhibited in the magnificent halls of the Landscape Museum of Verbania, and applied art, the one represented by the many objects, prototypes and models preserved by the Alessi Museum: the exhibition Unusual conversations, set up at the headquarters of the Landscape Museum at Palazzo Viani Dugnani (Via Ruga 44 – Verbania), explores the affinities between these two permanent collections, apparently linked to distant cultural and expressive worlds, revealing a surprising interweaving of correspondences and analogies.

Unusual conversations, curated by Francesca Appiani and Luca Bottiroli (respectively senior and junior curator of the Alessi Museum), was born from a “multidisciplinary roped group” of Enti – the Landscape Museum, the Alessi Museum and the Stresa Festival with the Stresa Young Festival – that have undertaken an important synergy aimed at proposing shared events, of which the exhibition is one of the first realized for the summer period. On the occasion of the presentation to the press of the exhibition, on July 7 at 18.00 there will be a musical intervention by the guys of the Stresa Festival Young Association who will perform some arrangements of music from films in which Alessi objects appear.

The exhibition develops along the exhibition path of the Landscape Museum, presenting a series of grafts and juxtapositions between the works shown in it and a selection of materials from the collection of the Alessi Museum. Room after room the visitor is invited to discover the network of references, sometimes curious and unpredictable, among the paintings and sculptures preserved in the beautiful Palazzo Viani Dugnani in Verbania and the projects of applied art collection Alessi: the sublime female portraits of the sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy, for example, dialogue with the “design portraits” of which Alessandro Mendini was one of the most extraordinary interpreters, while the mountain and its exciting landscapes is shown as a source of inspiration not only of the romantic views painted by Federico Ashton but also of design projects, like the new tray designed by Pierfrancesco Cravel that reproduces the fascinating orography of Lake Liconi.

Fourteen strands have been identified to explore these new affinities: Genetic Tales, The multidisciplinarity in the project, The design portrait, Development and prototyping, Monumental approaches, Inspiration and prototyping, The tradition of wood, The Drawn Nature, Peasant Roots, The Enchanted Mountain, Working with the Earth, The Feminine Project, Circus Suggestion and Evocative Geometries.

Two hundred objects from the collection of the Alessi Museum exhibited next to the works of the Landscape Museum: prototypes, products and models, some of which never made, created by some of the most famous Italian and international designers and architects, such as Ettore Sottsass, Achille Castiglioni, Aldo Rossi, Philippe Starck, Zaha Hadid and Odile Decq.

Two further installations accompany the exhibition. The first presents the work Household Gold Factory, created by the video artist Ali Kazma after an artistic residency in the production plant of Alessi in Crusinallo di Omegna. The work was presented in 2008 at the Galleria Francesca Minini in Milan and was acquired by the Alessi Museum. The second installation presents the results of the research operation 100 make-up, developed by Alessi in 1992 involving one hundred international authors, from different creative disciplines, from painting to music, from design to graphics, such as Mark Kostabi, Plumcake, Nanda Vigo, Carla Accardi, Milton Glaser, Yoshiki Hishinuma, Randi Kristensen and Shiro Kuramata.