Gio Minelli

Giovanni Minelli was born in Bergamo, on the 15th of December 1976. During his studies at Art School in Brera, he attended the industrial design courses together with D. Boriani and Roberto Semprini. The first projects born during this forming period, they place themselves between art objects and industrial design, unique pieces, which will be soon inserted in the circuit of the contemporary art galleries. He is invited to important exhibitions and presentations of the sector. This process inserts him quickly in the emergent art design brand, calling attention to himself and coming nearer to the emergent Italian design companies. Furthermore, when he was very young, he created unique pieces and installations for contemporary art events and was invited, together with other important Italian designers at the project “The Italian design for Unicef," which was exhibited during the inauguration of the Italian museum of design in Milano (in the occasion of the triennial fair). In his works, he united his artistic origins with technologies and researches typical of industrial design.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.