Nov 12

Nov 12 The W+ Design: Memphis at Post Design Gallery / Milan

When in Milan, make a stop at Post Design Gallery, the official home of the iconically 80s Memphis-Melano collection of furnitures and objects. Today one can visit Post Design, a nice ground floor space partially hidden within an interior courtyard of an old building complex in Milan’s Brera District. Brera is Milan’s de facto design district, home to furniture studios and showrooms. Post Design’s main initiative is to be the global destination of Memphis style furniture and objects, both vintage and reproduced.

Officially launched in 1981, the “Memphis” movement began when a group of young emerging designers met in Ettore Sottsass’s living room, discussing practice, design, and the state of their work relative to that time. The record player in the room played “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” on repeat by Bob Dylan, which in the end was partly accredited for the name of the movement. This meeting of key designers was then followed up with concept drawings giving initial form to the first Memphis pieces to be built.

Post Design Gallery - Photo by JJ Acuna.

Internationally, designers in the late 70’s and early 80’s practiced a more “Post-modern” approach to formalism- ie. designing with classical tropes without the reductionist tenets of mid-century modern or international styles. The Memphis method of design took those ideas and gave it a uniquely Italian spin. The actual public launch of the Memphis was in the late summer of 1981 in the Arc’74 Showroom, which included works by some international well-known talents by the likes of Michael Graves, Shiro Kuramata, and Arata Isozaki who worked with similar formal motifs. The exhibition quickly garnered worldwide attention, helping these designers connect with large name furniture brands like Artemide, for collaboration and fabrication of these whimsical new concepts.

According to artistic director of that first show, Barbara Radici, in her book on Memphis, “the new language mixed elegance and kitsch, dialoguing with absurd and irrational shapes, using plastic laminates with patterns that simulate precious materials, but most of all it introduced the pleasure of play into the rational language of industrial production.” Memphis is known to take Classical forms found in traditional architecture, patterns and textures found in marble, granite, and stone, grid lines and proportions in golden ratios, bold colours and graphic work inspired by the TV, pop music, and the visual mediums of that time period, and remix it all as a new language and narrative in design.

To this day everything on display at Post Design Gallery, whether reproduced from original designs or completely new works by those same artists or a new generation- are displayed together in a series of rooms to show a trajectory in study and thought, and an evolution of critical form making and design thinking over time.

For me as a designer- of course it’s nice to see all of this- the complete collection of Memphis furniture and objects in one total space. It’s inspiring to see, feel, and touch. Post Design Gallery is as much a gallery and shop as it a museum of past but still influential ideas and concepts- where anyone interested and have the resources to purchase the pieces, can buy them directly. This is really one of the tenets of the Memphis style- using design as a means to communicate and bridge. The Post Design Gallery space helps with that connection for current and future generations of design lovers and enthusiasts to come.

This blog post was made possible with the Camera, Photo, and SquareSpace apps, all on the iPhone 7 Plus and the iPad Pro 2020.

SHOP Post Design Gallery . Largo Treves, 5, 20121 Milan, Italy . T: +39-02-6554731 . E: postdesign@memphis-Milano.it . W: www.memphis-Milano.com

JJ.