Circle Small Resin Basket in Clear Aqua and Matt Turquoise by Enzo Mari

Enzo Mari was an influential industrial designer and a beloved curmudgeon who revered Marxism. His vintage mid-century modern designs are simple, functional and poetic. Widely known Mari-designed objects include desk accessories, such as the Formosa perpetual wall calendar, vases, cocktail tables and chandeliers. 

Enzo Mari's work is embedded within the city of Milan, the Italian capital of all things design. In fact, the traffic bollards he devised are part of the city itself: Shaped like "panettone" cakes, they simultaneously direct traffic and provide seating for pedestrians.

In 1974, Mari published Autoprogettazione? (roughly translated as self-design), a Marx-inspired, anti-industrial, do-it-yourself handbook for the everyday person to use to build furniture without the assistance of a glitzy designer or knowledge of complex joinery. Mari’s intent with the publication was to remove the alienation of the creator and manufacturer from the end product by teaching anyone to develop a critical eye for production.

Artek relaunched kits based on the blueprints in the manual in an exhibition at Spazio Rossana Orlandi in 2010. The subsequent collectability of his work was reportedly irksome for Mari because he abhorred the industrial production for which he was becoming known.

Mari’s meager upbringing heavily influenced his politics, and even in childhood, he would come up with ingenious ways to support the family financially. As a designer, the desire to envision and build significant pieces was more important to Mari than devising new marketing and retail sales tactics. He optimistically believed objects could change the world. This view went against the rising consumer mania for every next trend that surfaced in the late 20th century. Not surprisingly, his ecological and economical stance led him to produce fewer objects.

Mari's philosophy did not stop people from desiring his creations, nor prevent other designers from wanting to collaborate with him. Following World War II, he worked for companies like Danese, Olivetti, Artemide, Driade and Alessi, who brought his prodigious designs to the public, and Mari’s work was widely celebrated. 

The Golden Compass, Italy's highest honor for industrial design, was awarded to Mari four times before he died from COVID in 2020, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art has a permanent collection of his objects on display.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of Enzo Mari decorative objects, folk art and serveware.

In the mid-90’s Gaetano Pesce pioneered the use of the resin to create design products. As an artist, craftsman and alchemist, he started to create unique objects pouring the resin into moulds and “letting the material to become objects”. In 1996 the Fish Design adventure begins. In 2003 Pesce meets Andrea Corsi and sharing the magic formula, he entrusted him to create a new range of products. Andrea started to reproduce "what seemed so easy to make when he was making it" and in no time he added his way of conceiving objects to Gaetano Pesce’s great intuition. He became an alchemist himself, changing the resin composition and working on its transparency; different approach from Pesce’s traditional opaque colours. The flowing and visionary shapes created by Fish Design for more than 20 years - the vases POMPITU, SPAGHETTI, MEDUSA, AMAZONIA, - from the hands of Gaetano Pesce before and Andrea Corsi later, have become a chapter of design history. In addition to the renovated vase collections, Andrea Corsi and his team of young artists/craftsmen created new ranges of products, “wearable” objects and collections in collaboration with design masters like Alessandro Mendini, Enzo Mari, Humberto and Fernando Campana. Unique collections such as Mendinismi, Lezione by Enzo Mari and Nativocampana show the different ways of thinking and shaping objects using the same material. Andrea Corsi’s adventure, based on Gaetano Pesce’s teachings, keeps developing, following its own creative path.