Carlo Mollino: Polaroids FROM THE PUBLISHER
Carlo Mollino (1905ﾽ1973) 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.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New Yorker
One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was renowned both for his sleek, ultramodern furniture design and architecture and for his refined hedonism; he was a drug addict who raced cars and flew his own plane. Sometime around 1960, Mollino began to seek out women, mostly prostitutes, in his native Turin, bringing them to his villa for late-night modelling sessions, where they posed for Polaroid photographs, against backgrounds that he designed. The pictures remained a secret between Mollino and his subjects until after his death, in 1973, when some two thousand were found. This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women.
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