Macchina inutile

Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli 1990

Munari, Bruno

717

quattro elementi in legno laccato bianco in sviluppo orizzontale

Astrattismo in Italia nella raccolta Cernuschi Ghiringhelli - Villa Croce, Genova - 1985

Bruno Munari was a great experimenter, also in the direction of the applied arts. He started making the first ‘Machines’ in 1933 and in fifteen years designed 93 of them, using techniques derived from the industrial production of serial products. The first works had allusive titles (‘Sensitive Machines’, ‘Machine Breath’), which then turned ironically into ‘Useless Machines’ to emphasise the pure and unique aesthetic function unrelated to any functionality and efficiency. ‘Personally, I thought it would be interesting to free the abstract forms from the static nature of the painting and suspend them in the air, connected to each other so that they would live with us in our environment, sensitive to the true atmosphere of reality’.