One of the first developers of the company image, together with Xanti Schawinsky and Giovanni Pintori, Nivola executes a number of posters and advertising campaigns highly innovative for that time.Īfter his escape to the United States in 1939 he earns his living working as a graphic designer. After receiving his diploma at the ISIA of Monza, from 1936 to 1938 he works in Milan as an graphic designer for Olivetti, a company that, thanks to the foresight of Adriano Olivetti, plans its communication, product design and the architecture of its factories according to artistic criteria. Nivola is today known mostly as a sculptor, but for over twenty years he was primarily a graphic designer and illustrator. Dismantled in 1969 at the closure of the Olivetti showroom, the relief was relocated to the Science Center at Harvard University in 1973 on the initiative of the architect, Josep Lluís Sert. The great success of the project situates Nivola internationally as an ideal collaborator for modernist architects, while at the same time serving to affirm Italian creativity and design overseas. Visually detached from the sea-green floor and from the sky-blue ceiling as a strip of light, the “sand-wall”, with its grainy beach-like surface, lends a sense of lightness, and helps to evoke an image of the Mediterranean. In 1954, with the decoration of the Olivetti showroom on Fifth Avenue in midtown New York, Nivola begins his career as a “sculptor for architecture.”ĭesigned by the Milan studio BBPR, the showroom is a place rich in imaginative, almost surrealist inventions: marble stalagmite-pedestals for the merchandise, stalactite-lamps in Murano glass, the large wheel of a paternoster connecting the street level showroom to the level below, and a typewriter placed on the sidewalk to entice passers-by. A perfect example of the “synthesis of the arts,” where architecture, sculpture and design come together harmoniously to general effect, the project has in Nivola’s work its most suggestive element. The relief, 23 meters long, is made with the sandcasting technique invented by the artist, (a plaster sculpture from a matrix modeled in sand), and represents a series of semi-abstract figures, divinities carrying in their laps small human figures who welcome visitors with ample gestures. This period of exploration and research will soon bear fruit in Nivola’s first sculptural works. Between 19 he produces paintings and a multitude of drawings inspired by post-Cubism, by Le Corbusier’s and Fernand Léger’s paintings, as well as by Surrealism. The artist abandons his former figurative style, lively and elegant but still rather traditional, to begin a period of intense experimentation. During this time, Le Corbusier introduces Nivola to modernist art, teaching him the fundamental principles of form. In free time left over from design sessions for the UN, Le Corbusier uses Nivola’s New York atelier to paint, and is often a guest at his house on Long Island. Nivola meets the master of modernism shortly after Le Corbusier’s arrival in New York as a member of an international team of architects in charge of the design of the new United Nations headquarters, and they begin a friendship destined to last until the death of the architect in 1965. Le Corbusier puts an end to these uncertainties. In America, contact with fellow European artists and architects who had emigrated to escape Nazi persecution, leads him to doubt his creativity. The cultural shock of exile and of relocation to a new environment had initiated in him a phase of disorientation. The meeting with Le Corbusier in 1946 is for Nivola a defining moment in his artistic life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |