Tartar

Description

The Tartar design encapsulates Ettore Sottsass’s distinctive style, his focus on geometric forms, patterns and colours, and the group’s effervescent blend of high-end production and inexpensive materials. But the table, which featured in Memphis’s 1985 collection, reflected a significant shift in the collective’s style.

In the words of Barbara Radice, Memphis’s artistic director, ‘The 1985 exhibition evokes smoke-filled urban atmospheres, the streets of Blade Runner or the adventures of Terminator, a desperate post-nuclear hero roaming scorched landscapes amid the ruins of an imaginary “day after”. It’s the technological High Middle Ages, a literal no man’s land: the future, if indeed there is one, must be conquered anew with each successive day… The absurdity of a world in which there is the equivalent of 60 tons of dynamite for each human being…The furniture is no longer optimistic, joyful, gleefully infantile or pop, or even ironic. It is nearly austere, tyrannical, barbaric’.