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Carlton Room Divider

A colorful geometric shelf with two red drawers and various red, green, pink, blue, yellow, and black panels arranged vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, forming a tiered, anthropomorphic form.
© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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  • A colorful geometric shelf with two red drawers and various red, green, pink, blue, yellow, and black panels arranged vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, forming a tiered, anthropomorphic form.

Date:

1981

Artist:

Designed by Ettore Sottsass, Jr.
Italian, born Austria, 1917-2007
Manufactured by Memphis Furniture, S.R.L.
Milan, Italy, founded 1981

About this artwork

The collective Memphis sparked a revolt in the design world in 1981 with the launch of a collection combining bold geometries and wild patterns with banal materials like aluminum and Formica. One of the most striking pieces was Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton Room Divider, a bookshelf and cabinet that combines different colors of plastic laminate in a tiered, anthropomorphic form that seems to recall the head and arms of an ancient idol or totem. This famous piece also derives from Sottsass’s early work in the 1960s designing large laminate scultpures, or Superboxes, for the firm Poltronova.

Status

On View, Gallery 285

Department

Architecture and Design

Artist

Ettore Sottsass (Designer)

Title

Carlton Room Divider

Place

Milan (Object made in)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

Made 1981

Medium

Wood and colored plastic laminate (formica)

Dimensions

194.3 × 189.8 × 40 cm (76 1/2 × 74 3/4 × 15 3/4 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of the Antiquarian Society through the 1984 North Italian Trip Fund

Reference Number

1984.1035

Copyright

© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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