Vintage Jokes By Valentina Giovando

Valentina Giovando has an artist’s eye and masterful skill for furniture made from unconventional materials, from lamps draped with fiberglass scales to tables decorated with patterns of cut brass and zinc. She makes every work by hand so each is unique and a testament to her extraordinary capabilities. The Italian designer’s lighting, cabinets and bedroom pieces are audacious, expressive and supremely elegant.

Giovando’s influences are eclectic and her style does not fit into any box. Employing a vast range of materials — such brass, steel, fabrics and fiberglass — she draws her inspiration from nature and historic style eras, primarily Art Deco and Liberty, the Italian take on ​Art Nouveau. 

Born in Italy, Giovando had an early passion for artistic objects and was intrigued by both antique and contemporary pieces. She would add her own artistic flair to these objects, embellishing them with whatever materials were available. Through this experimentation, Giovando developed her practice with its singular style. She moved on to creating her own concepts for furniture pieces and lighting fixtures and bringing these visions to life.

In the 1990s, Giovando opened her own workshop in Sarzana, an Italian town known for its culture of art and design. She has since worked tirelessly and with great creativity to make a diverse offering of opulent works.

On 1stDibs, explore the rich selection of Valentina Giovando lighting, storage pieces, collectibles and more.

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 The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics.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.