Bocca Sofa by Studio 65 for Gufram, Iconic Pop Art Radical Design, Italy, 1980s

Every so often a company produces a design so iconic that it comes to symbolize its entire history. For Studio 65, the Italian avant-garde design collective cofounded by Franco Audrito, Piero Gatti and others, this was the Bocca sofa — alternatively known as the “lips sofa,” “red lip sofa,” “Dalí sofa” or Marilyn sofa.”

Studio 65’s lip-shaped seat — modeled after a singular feature from Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí’s portrait of Mae West — became a design icon shortly after its release in 1970 and remains a beloved collector’s item today. The Bocca symbolizes Studio 65’s playful, subversive approach to design. The collective took shape in Turin in 1965 with the goal of avant-garde experimentation. The group would eventually grow to comprise artists, designers and poets, including Roberta Garosci, Enzo Bertone, Paolo Morello and Paolo Rondelli. It would also play a central role in the Italian Radical design movement, the practitioners of which found inspiration in ​Pop art, minimalism and Arte Povera.

The Bocca sofa was born of one of Audrito’s earliest commissions — to design a gym in Milan — which he accepted just a year after graduating from architecture school. The collective enlisted Italian manufacturer Gufram, a firm at the forefront of Italian Radical design, to create a bold red sofa in the shape of plump lips; it was dubbed Marilyn after Ms. Monroe and was an instant sensation when installed at the fitness center.

Studio 65 would follow this with the also iconic Capitello side chair (another Gufram collaboration, now in the permanent collection at The Met), whose reimagining of a decapitated marble classical architectural column in squishy foam was an on-the-nose expression of the group’s pushback to traditional design. It’s a nod they iterated with the Attica coffee table, whose form appears sliced from an oversize column.

Though Studio 65 still operates as an architecture studio under the leadership of Audrito today, the original collective broke up in the late 1970s, making its output from the past decade sought-after fodder for collectors of postmodern, Radical and Italian design.

Find Studio 65 chairs, sofas and other furniture on 1stDibs.

The brainchild of the Fratelli Gugliermetto company, Gufram was born in 1966 in Turin, Italy, massively inspired by the avant-garde artistic culture that reigned in Europe during the 1960s and '70s. The brand is known for its CACTUS coat stand and sculptural seating such as the Pratone chair as well as other massive, innovative pieces that fall somewhere between art and furniture.

Starting in the mid-1960s, proponents of Italian Radical Design — which included forward-looking collectives like Archizoom and Studio 65 — broke with formality and convention by fusing the joy of Pop art with the systems of mass production. 

One of the brands that formed as a result of these experiments was Gufram, a manufacturer at the forefront of the country’s Radical Design movement. The Gugliermetto brothers teamed up with emerging artists to harness exciting new materials — among them, polyurethane foam, which was originally used in the transportation industry as insulation to keep buses and trains warm. 

Despite being credited for revolutionizing Italian design, until the mid-1970s, Gufram was largely unknown outside the small Italian town where it was founded. Nearly six years after the brand’s inception, though, word got out about a furniture brand transforming polyurethane foam into gigantic works of art. So, Gufram brought its playful and witty design concept across the Atlantic to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where it had its first international show. 

Gufram produced much of the Pop furniture — the CACTUS coat rack by Guido Drocco and Franco Mello and the Bocca sofa, in the shape of big red lips, by Studio 65 — that came to define the Anti-Design movement. (Through a relationship with Gufram, the latter was imported to the United States by Charles Stendig, a collector and pioneering importer who helped spark America’s interest in furniture from Finland, Switzerland and Italy during the 1960s and ‘70s.)

Although furniture can be serious business, it’s just as often playful, provocative, energizing and even liberating. Perhaps nothing embodies these characteristics better than postmodern Italian design. And one of the most iconic pieces to originate during Italy’s fertile period of postmodern furniture design is the Pratone chair, designed in 1971 by Giorgio Ceretti, Piero Derossi and Riccardo Rosso. 

Representing a magnified portion of a grassy meadow, the Pratone chaise provides a lounging place for an individual or a group. “It is so unlike anything else that it stands out and is still iconic after 50 years,” said Charley Vezza, Gufram’s global creative orchestrator.

Made of painted polyurethane foam, the Pratone chair immediately became the symbol of a new and different approach to interiors when it debuted.

Gufram has become a favorite of the international art crowd and glitterati, and its products have made their way to the world’s most renowned museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vitra Design Museum and more.

British fashion designer Paul Smith and American multi-hyphenate artist A$AP Rocky have collaborated with Gufram over the years. Interior designer Tony Ingrao has called the Pratone chair one of his favorite works and featured the larger-than-life piece in an exhibition he curated at R & Company in 2016. 

Find new and vintage Gufram chairs, sofas, mirrors and other Gufram furniture for sale on 1stDibs.