This article is part of our Design special report previewing 2023 Milan Design Week.
When Ambra Medda and Veronica Sommaruga teamed up to create AMO, they agreed their new design venture should aim for the stars.
After all, they were not newcomers to the field. Ms. Medda is an industry insider, a founder of Design Miami and a noted matchmaker between designers and brands. Ms. Sommaruga, a well-respected authority on textiles, has held key creative roles with companies like Vera Wang, Calvin Klein and Hermès.
Connected and experienced, they began searching for a high-profile collaborator to help bring their first product to the market.
“We wanted to go as high as we could go,” Ms. Medda said. “We thought, who is the most insanely, amazing person we could wish for.”
The list of possibilities was so boundless, it even included names of people who were no longer living, and in that realm, they decided upon actual superstars: Josef and Anni Albers, he the revered painter and color theorist; she the experimental weaver and patternmaker credited with transforming textile craft into fine art.
“From the very beginning of my career, they were my idols,” Ms. Sommaruga said.
They took their idea of developing new products inspired by the Alberses to the Connecticut-based Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, where the project received an enthusiastic endorsement. The longtime foundation director, Nicholas Fox Weber, saw it as a way to keep the Alberses’ legacy vital and to continue their creative mission through the eyes of 21st-century designers.
“Anni and Josef were deeply interested in having their approach to seeing and making art passed on to other people,” Mr. Weber said. “It was important to them that generations after generations feel the impact of their revelations.”
As for the products themselves, which will debut in an exhibition titled “Teatro Albers” during Milan Design Week, the AMO team turned to two designers who could create something fresh that captured the Alberses’ ideas, but make it with their own hands and be willing to take part in lectures and weaving demonstrations that will be held during the unveiling.
“People are estranged from the process. They know only the finished product,” Ms. Sommaruga said. “To show people how fabric is woven is really a great opportunity.”
They chose the furniture designer Marco Campardo to explore the proposals outlined in Mr. Albers’s seminal book “Interaction of Color,” which postulated — to simplify things considerably — that our perception of colors changes depending on the context in which we see them. Mr. Campardo developed Tutti Frutti Megalith, a series of benches that he is fabricating himself. Each piece is made of resin, which is poured into a cardboard mold that is destroyed in the production process.
“In that way, every piece is unique — similar, but unique in the sense that every time we have to break down the mold and then recreate the shape,” said the designer, who refined his objects at Grymsdyke Farm studios in Buckinghamshire, England.
His benches, which he considers three-dimensional manifestations of concepts that Mr. Albers expressed in two-dimensional paintings, are produced in trios of eye-challenging colors — one is pink, light gray and green; another is pink, white and orange — and the point is to show how combining colors in different ways alters their essence.
“The idea is that colors are in motion and the way that you mix them is going to give you a completely different outcome,” he said.
The seating will be used for the workshops, as well as offered for sale. So it will allow visitors to take a rest as they attend the sessions conducted by the master weaver Laura de Cesare, who was chosen by AMO to reinterpret Ms. Albers’s textile concepts.
Ms. de Cesare said she studied Ms. Albers’s original fabrics, magnifying photos of the work to understand the different materials and techniques that were employed. “It was a very emotional process,” she said. “I got to know Anni through the gestures she made.”
But she decided her own woven wares, which will be available for use in things like window coverings or wall hangings, should be developed not in her Pisa, Italy, studio, but before an audience to underscore the Alberses’ dedication to instinct and spontaneity in the creation process.
She will perform that work during the Milan exhibition, using looms that the public also will be invited to try out. The interactive demonstrations are crucial to her concept for reviving the Alberses’ ideas. Both were lifelong teachers, known for their work at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in particular, and their legacy is best understood in that context, she said.
The notion of using the exhibition as a learning center pairs nicely with its location at Istituto Marcelline Tommaseo, a century-old nunnery and school in Milan, which has never hosted an exhibition during design week. AMO’s co-founders knew of the space because they both attended school there, though at different times. In return for using the building, the designers promised the Marcelline Sisters that they would conduct classes for the students.
To pay back the Alberses for their inspiration, AMO has pledged to donate a portion of its proceeds to Le Korsa, a nonprofit organization started by the Albers Foundation that supports health care, art and education in Senegal.
In addition to the new pieces created by the designers, AMO will use the event to introduce large-scale woven room dividers that it commissioned based on pieces Ms. Albers created for a 1949 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The dividers are being produced by the Italian company Clerici Tessuto.
Mr. Weber, who knew the Alberses and has run their foundation for more than four decades, said he believed the exhibition’s combination of new and older designs, in addition to a teaching component, fits with the couple’s personal mission as artists and educators.
“Anni and Josef loved talking to children about the fundamentals of weaving or the fundamentals of color interactions.” he said. “To have these reinterpretations would have been very exciting to them and very fresh.”
Ray Mark Rinaldi
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