Michele De Lucchi. With the hands and the mind

Forty years of experimentation between art, design and architecture.
Curated by Paola Nicolin

Volumnia presents the exhibition Michele De Lucchi. With the hands and the mind. Forty years of experimentation between art, design and architecture curated by Paola Nicolin and dedicated to Michele De Lucchi’s most personal works. It explores his wide-ranging production, from architectural models to his experimental design objects from Produzione Privata, as well as sculptures and artworks.
For over forty years, Michele De Lucchi has been active in the fields of architecture, interior and product design, graphics, and installations, with projects that push beyond the boundaries of what has already been imagined and built. But his main source of inspiration in this professional world lies in a more intimate ‘hands-on’ process, where working manually in direct contact with matter, the architect is free to create new forms, beyond any practical or functional constraints. For De Lucchi, working with hands allows thought to directly connect with the physicality of the real world. In this manual- mental process, the idea is thus turned into a signifying object.

The works on show

A selection of prototypes and historical pieces, which have become rare over time due to their limited production, outline the identity of Produzione Privata: the design workshop founded in 1990 by Michele De Lucchi and Sibylle Kicherer, to give continuity to the Memphis experience and to devise experimental objects, independent from any market logic. These include furniture, furnishings and lamps made by craftsmen, the result of work on the border between art and design.

The exhibition path continues with the display of objects and artworks, research undertaken by De Lucchi in 2003 and which today includes over 500 sculptures, most of them made of wood, his material of choice. These unique works are tangible evidence of the process that indissolubly links the search for new forms and architectural concepts to professional projects. For the occasion, three models of small stone architecture produced in 2007 are also on show.

Pencil sketches, tempera drawings, and engravings offering an overview of the range of techniques adopted by the artist to express concepts in nuce, to formulate hypotheses and come up with new solutions.

Exhibition project
AMDL CIRCLE
Simona Agabio (project architect) Alberto Nason

Light design by Davide Groppi

Archivio Michele De Lucchi, Margherita Baetta, Cristina Moro