Andrea Branzi

(*1938, IT)
Fontana Albero, 1994-2020
Bronze, aluminum, electric pump
150 × 280 × 270 cm

A pioneer of Italian radical architecture, Andrea Branzi is a designer, the founder of the collective Archizoom Associati and a co-founder of the Memphis Group. His “tree fountain” presented here, Fontana Albero, is an example of his longstanding inquiry into the relationships between the natural and the artificial. It can beseen as an outgrowth of his “Domestic Animals” series of the 1980s, in which he combined tree parts with industrially fabricated metals and other synthetic materials, and which formed the first objects of a style he called “neo-privitivism.” Fontana Albero borrows both from Western imitative furniture traditions and from the Yixing pottery of 11th-century China.