Gabriella Crespi

Gabriella Crespi (17 February 1922 - 14 February 2017) was an Italian artist-designer whose work spanned furniture, jewellery and sculpture. At the end of the 1950s she began working as a designer and presented her first collections in…

Biography

Background

Gabriella Crespi (17 February 1922 - 14 February 2017) was an Italian artist-designer whose work spanned furniture, jewellery and sculpture. At the end of the 1950s she began working as a designer and presented her first collections in Milan.

Signature Style

Wikipedia says she transformed objects by adding changes in their function and developed her style across a repertoire of more than two thousand pieces. It compares her working methods to those of Renaissance workshops, which joined craftsmanship and an artistic approach. GUBI describes a gift for streamlined forms and lavish material finishes, and an eclectic style that was at once organically whimsical and formally geometric.

Notable Works

From the early 1960s Dior commissioned objects from her for gifts, home decor and dining. In the 1970s and 1980s she gained an elite place among furniture designers with series such as Plurimi (1970-1982) and the Z Line (1972-1974), alongside pieces such as Obelisk, Moons and Kaleidoscope. GUBI says she designed the Bohemian 72 Collection in the spring of 1972 from the terrace of her home in Milan, as part of her Bamboo Collection of 1972-1975 with the Rising Sun and Five Positions collections.

Legacy

Crespi retired in 1987 and spent two decades in the Himalayas, publishing the book Ricerca di Infinito Himalaya in 2007. A retrospective, The Sign and the Spirit, was held at Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2011. In 2019 her daughter Elisabetta Crespi put the Fungo lamp from the Rising Sun Collection back into production with the original craftspeople, and GUBI produced the Bohemian 72 Collection for the first time in the year she would have turned 100.