16 Facts About Piero Fornasetti

Piero Fornasetti was an Italian artist and designer.

Piero Fornasetti's oeuvre, spanning over 13,000 works, displayed a wide range of objects and furniture with a unique emphasis on decorative diversity.

Piero Fornasetti's enduring impact continues through the work of his son Barnaba and admirers worldwide.

Piero Fornasetti was born in 1913 into a well-off middle-class family in Milan.

Piero Fornasetti constantly sought reproducibility in series in his works, explaining this choice in terms of democratic and technical principles.

Piero Fornasetti spent his childhood in the apartment building built by his father Pietro, in the Citta Studi district, where at the time the city ended and the fields began.

The first child in a wealthy bourgeois family, he found himself facing a seemingly predetermined future: his father, an entrepreneur, had decided that Piero Fornasetti would follow in his footsteps, taking on the family business.

Contrary to family expectations, Piero Fornasetti displayed an innate artistic inclination.

Together with his penchant for drawing, Piero Fornasetti soon revealed his tough, determined character, demonstrating his resolve to pursue his aspiration.

Piero Fornasetti then moved on to the Higher School of Applied Arts in Industry at the Castello Sforzesco, in Milan, where he completed his schooling.

Thanks to the experience he had acquired and his passion for printing, from the 1940s onwards Piero Fornasetti created a series of limited edition graphic works.

In 1952 Piero Fornasetti began working on what would later become his most famous and iconic series: "Tema e Variazioni".

At that time, Lina Cavalieri represented an archetype of enigmatic, classical beauty that Piero Fornasetti reinterpreted by means of over 400 "variations".

Piero Fornasetti struggled to align himself with the new logic of the market and industrial production.

The difficulties encountered in this period led to a cooling in relations with Ponti, who reproached Piero Fornasetti for being unable to reinvent himself.

Piero Fornasetti's style is full of theatricality, an invitation to the imagination, trying to push those who observe his objects, as well as those who use them, to take a journey of the mind.