Fornasetti, Pair of engraving decoration wood doors, 1980’s

Piero Fornasetti, in the style of.

Pair wood doors with stuck and printed wallpaper decorated with engraving motifs and protected with a thick transparent varnish.
The frond of the doors is decorated with an engraved sepia scene in the 18th century engravings style, figuring a lake landscape. A village took place in the background and on the foreground we can see evolving characters, surrounded by trees, such as a women who gave an apple to a child, fishermen, washerwomen or also a rider and his companion.
The back side of the doors are decorated with geometrical motifs of interlacing with guilloche motifs parts, all in cream and clear brown shades.

Italian work realized in the 1980’s.

Notches indicated they were used as sliding doors.

Dimensions : H 215 x W 106 x D 5 cm.

Reference : LS41281351

Piero Fornasetti (1913-1988) was an Italian painter, designer, sculptor and an interior decorator. From 1930 to 1932 he was trained at the Beaux-Arts Academy of Brera. His career began with the painting by the representation of modern subjects of the Italian life, such as the Genoa harbor or the butterflies’ seller. Then he experimented engraving and print techniques in his father workshop and succeeded to develop certain dexterity and an execution precision. He participated to the Milan Triennial at 20 years old and proposed series of printed silk scarves. He created the Stamperia d’Arte Piero Fornasetti and published books and prints of famous artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Marino Marini and Lucio Fontana. His artistic approach spreads all items, surfaces or materials. He was interested in glass, earthenware, fabric, wood and paper professions.
He met Gio Ponti in 1940 and began a partnership with him for many years. They imagined together complete decors for oceans liners, casinos or private houses. From 1943 to 1946, he had to exile in Switzerland, and then in the 1950’s he came back to Italy to realize furniture and items adorned with a woman face inspired by the Italian singer Lina Cavalieri, one of his most famous repetitive motifs.
In 1970, he founded the bibliophiles gallery where are exhibited artworks from contemporary artists that interacted with his own items. He also opened many shops in Milan and Turin that permitted him to sell his productions.
From the 1980’s, while the company declined, Piero’s son, Barnaba, collaborated with him to raise the company and then continued his father’s work after his death and adapting it to the contemporary design.
Fornasetti was mainly a graphic artist with the line use as an expressive medium. However, the use of colours is secondary and he focused on repetitive motifs that he reproduced in series as fantasies architectures, cards games, saltimbanques, harlequins, ruins, landscapes and trompe-l’œil. His sources are eclectic, as intellectual as visual, and made an echo to an old tradition of architecture compilation, buildings engravings or architectural schemas, dating from the Antiquity or the Italian Renaissance. He created a theatrical decorative universe that subjects are imbued with fantasy and poetry. To the simple and pure shapes of the modernism, Fornasetti opposed his humor, his dreams and his illusions to create an imaginary world.

Source :

Site of Fornasetti by POMO, « History. La folie pratique or a flight of wit and imagination with Fornasetti », URL = http://www.fornasetti.com/history