Ode to Things

Ronan Bouroullec, John Currin, Filippo de Pisis, Peter Dreher, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Luigi Ghirri, Damien Hirst, Georges Jouve, Ingeborg Lundin, Aimée Moreau, Fischli/Weiss, Ed Ruscha, Ettore Sottsass, Rudolf Stingel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Goran Trbuljak e Franco Vimercati.

06.02.2025 – 08.08.2025
Spazio Mutina Fiorano

On February 6th 2025 Mutina for Art inaugurates Ode to Things, new exhibition project at the Mutina Headquarters in Fiorano Modenese in which modern and contemporary artworks meet modern and contemporary design. The exhibition—which takes its title from Pablo Neruda’s poem of the same name—highlights the importance of the objects that surround us and the revolutionary possibility of imagining and re-imagining them in space, in relation to our bodies and our feelings.
The project, curated by Sarah Cosulich, reunites a selection of twenty-six works of art and design (among them the Editions, realised in ceramics by Mutina) from the collection of Massimo Orsini. Through paintings, photographs and sculptures by seventeen artists and designers, the exhibition establishes a dialogue among different types of still lifes, suggested, built, inspired or derived: vases, bottles and glasses reflect, echo and multiply in the space, as in a fluid and seeming mirroring game. The life of things—an essential source of inspiration for Mutina’s ceramic work and a significant subject of the collection—becomes an impulse for an exchange without hierarchies which takes the shape of a large, all-encompassing composition. As in Neruda’s poem, the “inanimate” comes alive, and objects become figures on stage which, in their bi-dimensionality and tridimensionality, suggest stratified spaces and narrations.

Ode to Things celebrates the importance of the everyday, highlighting the diverse approaches through which common objects are interpreted. Language, form, existential metaphor, functionality, ironic reference, phenomenological study, intimate and subjective representation, a pretext to test the limits of painting: in the exhibition, images and things uncover a complex landscape of human desires, fears and beauty of the ordinary. The objects reveal themselves in the elegance of form and in the semantic complexities of their constructions, in a constant short circuit between modernism, illusionism, vanitas and seduction.

Presented on the occasion of Mutina’s twentieth anniversary, Ode to Things is also a celebration of the three souls of the company. The exhibition project is set up, in fact, as a dialogue among art, design and ceramics, giving way to a visual and conceptual narration which reflects the identity and vision of the brand. The works in the show thus become a homage to the creative path of Mutina, that, in the past twenty years, has collaborated with the most significant contemporary designers to celebrate the essence of ceramics.

ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS IN THE EXHIBITION

Ronan Bouroullec, John Currin, Filippo de Pisis, Peter Dreher, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Luigi Ghirri, Damien Hirst, Georges Jouve, Ingeborg Lundin, Aimée Moreau, Fischli/Weiss, Ed Ruscha, Ettore Sottsass, Rudolf Stingel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Goran Trbuljak, Franco Vimercati.

For more information and materials, please contact:

Stefano Pitigliani
press@mutina.it
+39 348 1412001