Ettore Sottsass, Jr. Italian, (born Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Austria), 1917-2007)
Memphis Furniture, S.R.L. (Italian, founded 1981)
Carlton Room Divider
INV-1030
Ettore Sottsass, Jr. Italian, (born Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Austria), 1917-2007)
Memphis Furniture, S.R.L. (Italian, founded 1981)1981
Carlton Room Divider
Ettore Sottsass, Jr. Italian, (born Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Austria), 1917-2007) Memphis Furniture, S.R.L. (Italian, founded 1981) →furniturecase furniture
Date
1981
Medium
Wood and colored plastic laminate (formica)
Dimensions
194.3 × 189.8 × 40 cm (76 1/2 × 74 3/4 × 15 3/4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of the Antiquarian Society through the 1984 North Italian Trip Fund
The collective Memphis sparked a revolt in the design world in 1981 with the launch of a collection combining bold geometries and wild patterns with banal materials like aluminum and Formica. One of the most striking pieces was Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton Room Divider, a bookshelf and cabinet that combines different colors of plastic laminate in a tiered, anthropomorphic form that seems to recall the head and arms of an ancient idol or totem. This famous piece also derives from Sottsass’s early work in the 1960s designing large laminate sculptures, or Superboxes, for the firm Poltronova.