Details:

This Putrella tray was designed by Enzo Mari and manufactured by the design studio Danese Milano in 1958. For these designs, skilled craftspeople modified industrial, semi-finished products to create a finished piece. As such, the original welds were made by workers who had nothing to do with traditional art or craft. Here, a slightly bent double-T-shaped metal industrial beam becomes a tray.
Unframed
Danese early aluminum label

① Artwork:

Putrella Tray

This Putrella tray was designed by Enzo Mari and manufactured by the design studio Danese Milano in 1958. For these designs, skilled craftspeople modified industrial, semi-finished products to create a finished piece. As such, the original welds were made by workers who had nothing to do with traditional art or craft. Here, a slightly bent double-T-shaped metal industrial beam becomes a tray.

Enzo Mari (1932-2020) was a noted Italian post-modernist artist, writer, and product & furniture designer who greatly influenced successive generations of industrial designers. He incorporated concepts from the Arts & Crafts movement and Communism into his design practice, opposing the idea that good design is a privilege for the wealthy.

Specs:

3.5 inches
18.63 inches
4.75 inches
18.63 inches

③ Artist:

Enzo Mari

Enzo Mari (1932-2020) was a noted Italian post-modernist artist, writer, and product & furniture designer who greatly influenced successive generations of industrial designers. He incorporated concepts from the Arts & Crafts movement and Communism into his design practice, opposing the idea that good design is a privilege for the wealthy.

Post-modernist artist, writer, and designer Enzo Mari (1932-2020) was born in Novara, Italy, and died in Milan, Italy. He studied at the Brera Academy in Milan, Italy, from 1952 to 1956.

Mari has mounted solo exhibitions of his work at La Triennale de Milano, a retrospective exhibition Enzo Mari curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli, in Milan, Italy (2020); “Adhocracy” at the Istanbul Design Biennial in Istanbul, Turkey (2012); “Art and Design,” a retrospective exhibition at GAM, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Turin, Italy (2008); The Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione at the University of Parma in Parma, Italy (1983); and elsewhere.

Mari’s art and design objects are in the collections of several contemporary art museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Triennale di Milano Museum.

Enzo Mari:
Putrella Tray, 1958
Iron
18.6 × 3.5 × 4.8 inches /
Coming soon