Carlo Mollino Polaroids

(Hardback)

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After the success of Polaroids published in 2000, Damiani announces the second edition with a new cover. Carlo Mollino (1905-1973) was one of the most inspired mid-20th-century architects and designers. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, cars, aircraft, women's fashion, and theater sets. He was a renaissance man who sought to articulate movement and sensuality in his designs. Even more compelling are the magically surreal Polaroid images Mollino made in his Turin studio during the last 14 years of his life, seen here in the first-ever collection of Mollino's carefully honed erotic photographs of women. From 1,500 works, the Ferraris have culled over 250 representative images in which Molino posed his models in evocative clothing, staged the backdrops, and finally, altered the photos with a microscopic paintbrush to attain his ideal view of the female form. Only a few of Mollino's Polaroids have ever been viewed by the public.

Reviews

Carlo Mollino: Polaroids is a collection of these photographs, selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973. The images are best described by adjectives closely associated with the presence of money: rich, sumptuous, lavish. They are all eroticized images of women, but the subject is not sex. It's clear that more so than the human body, Mollino was attracted to the aesthetic abstraction of beauty as a lifestyle. The photographs have been composed, staged and directed with the desire to conquer nature with artifice.

The eros in Mollino's work assumes a melancholy, poisonous aspect with the understanding of the circumstances of its production: part of an aging bachelor's desire to perfect the decoration of his house. There is something of satyriasis, or Don Juanism, the male equivalent of nymphomania, in Mollino's work, as if they were undertaken compulsively, and perhaps without joy, as part of a doomed project to reach an unattainable ideal: the tragic desire to keep thousands of women in an empty house.--Owen Campbell "American Suburb X"

Author Bio

Carlo Mollino is born in Turin in 1905. He studies architecture and in 1953 he becomes professor of architecture composition at the Turin University. So much important as architecture are the furnishing, the furniture as unique pieces, publications and critical books. He also has several interests such as ski, mechanics, racing cars, aereal acrobatics and photography. In 1945 E. Scopinich publishes the monographic book Ritratti ambientali. He builds between 1936-1960 some 'houses' where to set his pictures, which from an interest for surrealism and symbolism in black and white photos arrive to a specific women portrait, at first in colour them polaroid.Carlo Mollino died in 1973, while still working.