An image is not available here yet.
View at the museum ↗Carlton Room Divider
Ettore Sottsass1981
- Attribution
- Designed by Ettore Sottsass, Jr. Italian, born Austria, 1917-2007 Manufactured by Memphis Furniture, S.R.L. Milan, Italy, founded 1981
- Medium
- Wood and colored plastic laminate (formica)
- Physical dimensions
- 194.3 × 189.8 × 40 cm (76 1/2 × 74 3/4 × 15 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of the Antiquarian Society through the 1984 North Italian Trip Fund
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
View the museum record ↗From the museum
The collective Memphis sparked a revolt in the design world in 1981 with the launch of a collection combining bold geometries and wild patterns with banal materials like aluminum and Formica. One of the most striking pieces was Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton Room Divider, a bookshelf and cabinet that combines different colors of plastic laminate in a tiered, anthropomorphic form that seems to recall the head and arms of an ancient idol or totem. This famous piece also derives from Sottsass’s early work in the 1960s designing large laminate scultpures, or Superboxes, for the firm Poltronova.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0