Bruno Munari

Bruno Munari ( born October 24, 1907 in Milan, Italy, † September 30, 1998 ) was a versatile Italian artists. He worked as a painter, graphic artist and graphic designer, also for use graphics. He was also active as an artist in the fields of sculpture, film art and industrial design, both literature and poetry.

Life and work

Bruno Munari was born in Milan, but spent his childhood and youth in Badia Polesine. In 1925 he returned to Milan and began with his uncle, an engineer at work. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. In 1927 Munari Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Futurist movement began to follow a contestant on the second generation and has presented his work in numerous exhibitions. Some works by Munari in temperature from 1932 show that Munari had taken the futuristic aesthetics in his work. However, some further examples from the 1930s also show a turn towards surrealism.

In his sculpture of the 1930s, Munari showed other settings, for example, a shift to a constructivist aesthetics. He created elegant metal objects as abstract shapes in three dimensions. He also worked with the integration of the environment by kinetic action.

In 1930, he began a partnership with Riccardo Castegnetti ( Rica ), worked with the as a graphic designer until 1938. During a trip to Paris in 1933 he met Louis Aragon and André Breton. From 1939 to 1945 he worked as a graphic designer for Mondadori and as art director of the magazine Tempo.

After the Second World War, Munari focused on industrial design. He designed, for example, an alarm clock with rotating half - slices. At the same time, he began with the design of children's books, which were originally intended for his son Alberto. An exhibition of children's books illustrated by him was held in the Public Library of New York City in 1952.

In 1948 founded Munari, along with Gillo Dorfles, Gianni Monnet and Atanasio Soldati, the group Movimento Arte Concreta.

An important part of his art was always trying to get with new materials and different application of these materials new forms of expression. In 1950, he invented a new projection method and created mobile sculptures. Munari began with light projections by colored plastics for the experiment. He created compositions for color light therapy. The use of polarized light, special lenses and motorization enabled him to create complex and variable results and led to the production of his first colored light film " I colori della luce " in 1963 with electronic music.

Bruno Munari took part in the Venice Biennale in 1962 and 1970. He first used Photocopier at exhibitions for public dissemination of his conception of visual communication. He took part in documenta III in Kassel in 1964 in the Department of artwork and also the 4th documenta in 1968 in the Department of Sculpture, where he shows delicate objects from metal wire, which had an almost graphic character in three-dimensional design.

Munari in 1988 was awarded an Antonio Feltrinelli Prize.

Literature and sources

  • Documenta III. International Exhibition; Catalogue: Volume 1: Paintings and Sculpture; Volume 2: Hand drawings; Volume 3: Industrial design, graphic; Kassel / Cologne 1964
  • Exhibition catalog for Documenta IV: IV documentation. International Exhibition; Catalogue: Volume 1: ( painting and sculpture ); Volume 2: (graphics / objects ); Kassel 1968
  • Literature by and about Bruno Munari in the catalog that German national library
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