Design Gallery Milano’s Icons and Material Medley

Since the 1980s, Design Gallery Milano has been on a mission: to support the design vanguard. Working with designers intent upon disrupting the commerce-driven underpinnings of industrial design—the architects of postmodernism and masters of material experimentation, like Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, and Michele De Lucchi—it was one of the first galleries in the world to treat design production as a fine art and to develop limited edition design collections.

Design Gallery Milano is still going strong. The gallery’s presentation Icons during last week’s Salone was like a greatest-hits tribute to their three-decades-long quest for new design frontiers. And the dialogue between these now-classic pieces and the new work by Madrid-born, London-based studio El Ultimo Grito—entitled Material Medley—proves that design provocation and subversion are alive and well in the post-post-postmodern era.

Icons at Design Gallery Milano

Michele De Lucchi's Montefeltro

El Ultimo Grito's Material Medley Collection

El Ultimo Grito's Material Medley Collection

*All photos courtesy of Design Gallery Milano.