We are delighted to present an important collection from a single provenance, created by prominent collectors who, in the 1970s, built an excellent personal relationship with Gabriella Crespi. This collection includes various pieces of furniture and objects, such as the oversized “Puzzle Table” made at the request of the family, the oval bar from the Menhir series, the Elisse table from the Plurimi series, and a large and rare collection of animal sculptures. The splendid “Ippopotami” basin is a polished bronze sculpture of considerable size—approximately 40x60 cm— depicting four hippos bathing and drinking from a pond inscribed in a particularly uneven and rippled rocaille border.
"Highly mobile furniture that ultimately becomes multifunctional furniture. Surprise furniture that, like a game, opens, closes, changes, and transforms."
Gabriella Crespi's ideal is a piece of furniture that is highly mobile and does not mortify the space of a room. Hence, a constant search for the ease of rapid changes in the same piece of furniture: ease of development to become ‘multiple’.
In 1970, she began her actual series of furniture: new forms where commitment and rigor do not change the constant desire for movement. Furniture full of “life”: in opposition to the static sense, free in space and in continuous metamorphosis. His creations consistently follow a utilitarian philosophy of space, combined with a sense of functional aesthetics.
The “Puzzle Table,” a dining table made of brass, is like a metal structure with glass tops, each identifying a single place at the table, starting from an octagonal table composed of two consoles that can be expanded infinitely according to desire and need.
The “Jacaré” chairs—a Brazilian word for a small caiman that lives in the swamps of Central and South America—were created in 1975. With its extreme formal linearity, elusive and abstract, the folding seat, which can have a steel and stainless steel structure and steel mesh, or leather and brass, is reminiscent of the jaws of the reptile from which it takes its name.
Between 1970 and 1974, she created the small animals. All the different sculptures that make up the bestiary were made of polished, silver-plated, or gold-plated bronze and incorporate a transparent Murano glass egg, specially made by the famous Barovier&Toso glassworks.
This collection is therefore extremely representative of an expressive style that has made Gabriella Crespi a unique and unmistakable icon.