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KUNSTHALLE wien, Carlo Mollino, 2nd press release, August 2011

CaCaCaCarlo Mollinorlo Mollinorlo Mollinorlo MollinoUn Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura

31 August 25 September, 2011

Treitlstrae 2, 1040 Vienna, infoline +4315218933, www.kunsthallewien.at

Tue Sat 1 p.m. to midnight, Sun and Mon 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Opening:Opening:Opening:Opening: Tuesday, 30 August, 2011, 7 p.m.

He was a performer, this all skiing all flying character. His body was covered in scars from all the crashes hed had.

Simon Starling

He designed a racecar as a red doubletorpedo for the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans of 1955; he used the shape

of a female torso as the groundplan of a theatre; he redesigned an apartment in a villa in Turin, where he did not

spend a single night, into a sort of Egyptian pyramid for the afterlife; a keen alpinist, he wrote a book on the

technique of downhill skiing and being an architect, he planned a cableway station and several mountain houses; he

created interiors and furniture in a style labeled surreal engineering for which collectors pay top prices; he was a

passionate pilot master in aerobatics; he published the first Italian historical and comprehensive book on

photography, The message from the darkroom; he loved the Classical World as much as Art Nouveau; he was

particularly fascinated by female sensitivity, both as a photographer and for his organic designs talk is of Carlo

Mollino.

Born in 1905 into a Turin engineers welltodo family, Carlo Mollino began to work in his fathers office after

graduating in architecture. He practiced as an architect throughout his life, though today he has become famous

above all for the furniture developed for his interior design projects. His pieces of furniture were hand made unique

pieces manufactured with the highest quality. Being financially independent, he could focus on his personal

researches, developing his projects in detail as an artist, in the spirit of thegesamtkunstwerk.

Mollino was part of the Modern Movement yet he constantly endowed design solutions linked to human models,

sophisticated, organic and psychological. This intellectual attitude found itself side by side with a deep interest for the

language of the female body which he indulged in as a photographer: between 1962 and 1973, he shot over 1,000

polaroids portraying trough beauties of Turins night life the vision of an ideal woman. For this project he had

especially turned into a photographic studio a villa on the hills of Turin. In the 30s Mollino acted as a photographer

exhibiting in competitions and publishing his B&W portraits, in the 60s he kept polaroids hidden from public eyes,

besides the one of his friends. These late portraits hold an enigmatic position within Carlo Mollinos oeuvre. They

exemplify an intimate side of the universal artist who played presenting himself as a performer to the public and

secretly produced for himself the dearest and most needed representations, a self portrait.

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