A luminous career, lasting over 60 years, marked by works (and around forty awards and honours) which shaped the history of design with their sense of joy and a fusion of elegance and simplicity. Milanese and raised in a family of architects, Magistretti started his career in the studio of his father Pier Giulio, an architect. Between 1949 and 1959, in the reconstruction period of Post-War Milan, his name was connected, above all, with the construction sector. A genius of Italian creativity, architect, urbanist and industrial designer, Vico Magistretti is most loved for his attention given to homes and living and his subsequent creations. Among these is the Carimate chair, the first work that bears the name of Magistretti as a designer, at the start of the 1960s, the simple technology of the Dalù lamp, named after his old dachshund and the famed Eclisse, designed in 1965 and winner of the Compasso d’Oro Prize. His achievements also include innovative intuitions like the first plastic chair in the world or the first fully-padded bed designs. Today, his design works enrich the permanent collections of the MoMA in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Die Neue Sammlung in Munich and other institutions in the Americas and Europe.
Fragile and magnetic, a young woman stares out at the spectator beyond the canvas - not even its creator could pull himself away from the portrait of Concha Emiliana de Ossa, today in the collec-tion of the Pinacoteca of Brera.
