Ettore Sottsass

b. Innsbruck, Austria, 14 September 1917 – d. Milan, Italy, 31 December 2007

Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass is considered one of the most important figures of the 20th century. A pioneer and intellectual actively involved in public life, he built upon what he had learned while working for Olivetti in the 1950s, later drawing on this experience to help found the international Memphis movement in Milan in 1981 — a through-line extending across some thirty years of his career. Memphis was characterised by its playful, colourful furniture, which established innovative new associations between materials. Never losing sight of the importance he attached to light and colour, Sottsass’s research focused on how different materials, as well as abstract and geometric forms, might be used to transform people’s everyday lives.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris — whose collections feature the largest number of Sottsass’s works — hosted major retrospectives of his work in 1994 and 2008. A large exhibition was also held at the Musée national de Céramique in Sèvres in 2013 and 2017, while the Vitra Design Museum in Germany celebrated the hundredth anniversary of his birth.