At the Triennale

The Triennale is Milan's big modern art and design museum. I visited this weekend, and it was awesome. I went on a whim, I was going to go to the museums at Castello Sforzesco, but I decided at the last minute that I would go one subway stop further and head to the Triennale. It was an excellent choice on my part. The Triennale has several exhibition spaces that cycle at different rates. They don't let you take photos of the art, but they do let you take photos of the design.

The first exhibit I visited was art on time. A lot of the pieces were very awesome. Many of them were unconventional clocks. One of my favorites was a clock that was a calender on a roll that fed into a shredder. There was also a pretty awesome giant clock that looked like it stepped out of JT and Madonna's "4 Minutes" video. There was some cool video installations. I was not a fan of the Damien Hirst spin paintings that were in there. I prefer his grotesque vitrines. The spin paintings just look like any other craft spin art.

I also visited the installation of sculpture art by Italian artists from about 1965 on. This took up about half of the museum. Honestly, I quite liked many of the pieces. This sculpture art is very design and architecture informed. Some were kinetic, and many were plugged in or used water. One artist I liked that had several pieces in the show had exposed freezer coils in different shapes. One artist did a lot of work with standing water. My favorite from that set was a huge braided copper wire rope, suspended from the ceiling, along with big sheets of stainless steel that were draped to form shallow trays on the floor, with each end of the wire rope in one of the trays, each full of a different acid, one creating a blue oxide, the other a yellow-green oxide. I spent a lot of time in these galleries.

The place where you can take pictures is the furniture gallery. It was a very packed gallery! And you were allowed to touch and sit in many of the pieces. They were all pieces made in Italy, mostly designed by Italians, again from 1965 or so on. Some of the pieces were very normal, some very fantastical!

This chair I've seen in Forbes Life. It's folded structural felt. And seriously, it is a multi-thousand dollar chair.



And then there's lamps like this.



I have one of these in my apartment! Is mine a knock-off? I am going to give it a closer look tomorrow. Seriously though, look at yesterday's post. There's one of these lamps in my bedroom.

I thought these kids' furniture dogs were cute.



Here's me relaxing in a woven chair.



Anyway, I spent a very long afternoon there. It was great!