Bruno Munari

Simplification is the sign of intelligence, said Bruno Munari, who through meticulous research, driven by aesthetic and scientific intuitions, made objects that anyone could understand. There are many works by Munari marked by this elementary quality: the Macchine inutili (Useless machines, 1930), presented during his Futurist period, are the synthesis of “the functionality of what is useful” and “the uselessness of what is useless”; the Strutture continue (Continuous structures, 1959), each made of equivalent and interchangeable elements combined with one another; or the Sculture da viaggio (Travel sculptures, 1958), in folding card, to be put in a suitcase, which the artist made so that anyone could take them along and display them in anonymous hotel rooms as a point of contact with the places they had come from.
A monumental reproduction of this last work, in painted iron, which follows the shape of the folding originals, can be seen in the Parco d'Arte Quarelli. These Sculture da viaggio take their cue from origami, but Munari increases their creative possibilities by adding cuts, which produce in the “sculpture” combinations of solids and voids, light and shadow.

These travel sculptures have the function of creating, in an anonymous hotel room or in a place where one is a guest, a point of reference where the eye finds a link with the world of one's own culture. Together with painting to be projected in polarised light, they are part of a new way of art, better suited to today's life.

B. Munari, leaflet of the exhibition Sculture da viaggio, Galleria Montenapoleone, Milan, June 1958.