Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed

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Andrea Branzi

Civilizations without jewels have never existed, curated by Alessio de’ Navasques, set up at the 10·Corso·Como Gallery from December 18th, 2024 to February 16th, 2025.

Awarded with three Compasso d’Oro, one of which dedicated to his career, Branzi was a multifaceted and radical figure, the author of a forward-looking approach that crossed applied arts, domestic and urban space with an unprecedented sensitivity: a ‘poetic habitat’ and interdisciplinary that the exhibition focuses on starting with the series of gold and silver jewelry, Silver & Gold, and silver and birch wood objects, Silver & Wood, made in Belgium in the second half of the 1990s and collected in a retrospective exhibition at the Ghent Design Museum in 1998.
  Staged in collaboration with Nicoletta Morozzi and Lorenza Branzi as well as Casa Argentaurum and Friedman Benda galleries, Andrea Branzi. Civilizations without jewels have never existed is presented in an itinerary that lines up and creates a dialogue among works, documents, drawings and photographs. 

At the heart of the exhibition are the jewels, gold and silver garlands, crowns and necklaces that “adorn the human body in a landscape, heightening its aura with leaves and natural elements and highlighting that mystical dimension of ornamentation in its primordial meaning as a means to bring humans closer to the divine,” as Alessio de’ Navasques writes in the text accompanying the exhibition. The title of the exhibition recalls an assumption by Branzi appeared in an article published in the magazine Interni in November 2005: “if there have been societies without cities and architecture, there have never been societies without jewelry; because they are, above all, the obvious sign of a magical elaboration of the human being, and the symbol of the search for a secret order in the laws of the cosmos.”

This desire to overcome a certain rigidity and self-referentiality of modern architecture and design runs through Branzi’s thinking. Its implementation is realised by the hybridising with natural elements, an operation of symbolic re-signification that extends from applied arts to furniture, lamps and monumental scale projects.

The exhibition reconstructs the special relationship woven with Belgium between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, with private and institutional commissions, through the hybrid objects of the Wood & Stones series – boxes and sculptural lamps -, in which the use of wood and stone seems intended to heal the distance between science and nature, to the silver objects of the Silver & Wood series in which the elements of the traditional tea service are translated into linear forms with intersections of branches and plant fragments. It is again the purity of the silver weavings of baskets and containers that evoke archaic and symbolic forms, with references to Shaker culture. The monumental installation of the Grande Vaso in Ghent in 1999 is traced through documentation and prototypes.

Highlighting the lines of continuity in the designer’s incessant and all-encompassing reflection on the tension between modernity and nature, the exhibition includes original examples of the famous seating series Domestic Animals – conceived in the mid-1980s – in dialogue with the more recent series Stones 2A – already part of the Trees & Stones exhibition at the Friedman Benda gallery in New York in 2012, where trunks and stones as elements of a prehuman archaeology relate to industrial materials – and Germinal Bench of 2022, in which the use of bamboo canes, compared by Branzi to a forest of organ pipes, reverberates the concept of nature as a form of infinite architecture.

Open daily: 10.30am - 7.30pm
Free Admission