Enzo Mari—Sixty Paperweights: The Intellectual Work

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Alessio Ascari

Barbara Casavecchia

Kaleidoscope Press, Milan, 2010, English and Italian

Nonfiction, Product/Industrial Design

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition “The Intellectual Work: Sixty Paperweights,” held at Kaleidoscope Project Space (Milan) in April 2010. For the first time, Enzo Mari (b. 1932), master of Italian design, brings together a wide selection from his personal collection of paperweights and objets trouvé that Mari considers paradigmatic of his own practice. The publication was realized in collaboration with the designer, featuring a critical essay by Barbara Casavecchia and photographs by Carlo Lavatori.

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I bought this catalogue in 2010 at the exhibition of Enzo Mari’s paperweight collection at Kaleidoscope in Milan. I spent an hour walking around the exhibition photographing each one of the paperweights on display before realizing that this book—which catalogues Mari’s fascinating collection—was for sale. It is a simple book on a simple theme, and like the exhibition offers a world of objects whose forms bear a clear, but always surprising relationship to their materials.

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