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• Looking at Carlo Mollino’s life in a ‘twilight avenue’.

By WILFRIED KUEHN [Domus] – The exhibition Maniera Moderna at Haus der Kunst, Munich includes a broad selection of works reflects the versatility of Carlo Mollino’s oeuvre: on view are his drawings and architectural plans, furniture and furnishings, Mollino’s race car Bisiluro, his photomontages, Polaroids of female nudes, his essays on architecture, photography and downhill skiing, as well as other archival material. A photographical essay by Armin Linke created for the exhibition provides an overview of Mollino’s constructions and their state of preservation….

When creating settings for female models in his interiors he allows materials that are soft and silky to abut onto hard and severely reflecting surfaces. The manner in which he treats light and shadow, materiality and surfaces, recalls the work of Man Ray. The effects live from artificial light, as corresponding to a night person.

Initially acquaintances like Ada Minola and Lina Modell serve as his models. A central feature of these images is the wavy, shining hair, which Mollino arranges with the precision of a highgloss magazine. He later replaces the Leica with a Polaroid…Surrounded by the women of the Polaroids and other personal treasures, Mollino wanted to sail away in a boat-shaped bed: “I am preparing, like the Chinese of rank who in life adorns his own mausoleum, a corridor of my house to be a twilight avenue where the photographs and many other mementos of life shall follow in sequence: all beautiful, or almost”, he wrote in 1973, the year in which he died of a heart attack.

More than two thousand Polaroids were later found in this apartment…

Continued in Domus | More Chronicle & Notices.

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