Centro Fly Milano 1966: Ettore Sottsass & Andy Warhol

Mitterrand | St-Honoré is pleased to present Centro Fly: Ettore Sottsass & Andy Warhol, an exhibition highlighting the dialogue between art and design in the mid-1960s, revisiting the spirit of the historic exhibition Mobili Fly, presented at Centro Fly in Milan in February 1966.

In the context of Italy’s economic miracle, Ettore Sottsass developed for Poltronova a series of now-iconic pieces of furniture. Brought together under the name Mobili Fly, these objects break away from strict functionalism to assert an autonomous presence in space. Through their simple geometric forms, emphatic verticality, and radical use of color and material, they transform furniture into signs—at the crossroads of architecture and sculpture.

Presented at Centro Fly in a scenography conceived by Gae Aulenti, these works were placed in dialogue with images drawn from popular culture and Pop Art, underscoring the gradual dissolution of boundaries between disciplines. Design became a visual language in its own right, engaging with the forms and codes of contemporary art.

It is within this continuity that Centro Fly: Ettore Sottsass & Andy Warhol takes place today. The exhibition brings together a selection of major works by Andy Warhol—emblematic of his exploration of repetition, frontal composition, and mass culture—set in resonance with Sottsass’s creations from the Mobili Fly period.

Without illustrating a literal historical dialogue, the exhibition reveals formal and conceptual correspondences: the elevation of the ordinary object to the status of icon, the extreme simplification of forms, and the visual power of both image and furniture.

Between art and design, Centro Fly: Ettore Sottsass & Andy Warhol sheds light on a pivotal moment of modernity, when the domestic object and the Pop image partake in a shared project: rethinking our relationship to forms, signs, and contemporary visual culture.