Parallel Visions, an exhibition part of the NGV - Melbourne Design Week. It was generously supported by the Italian Museum (Co.As.It), Space Furniture and Swinburne University of Technology.

Please view and read the exhibition catalogue attached that articulates the interception between Modernist Italian design and contemporary art.

Italian design is famous throughout the world for its quirky, avant-garde ideas. The BBPR group, Alessandro Mendini, Bruno Munari, Giuseppe Pagano, Gaetano Pesce and Gio Pomodoro are all big names in Italy’s art, design and architectural history but history does not just live in the past it can continue to shape the future.

In this exhibition you will see a diverse range of work including paintings, photographs, sculptural objects, specially designed display panels and virtual reality experiences – each created individually but imagined collaboratively. We have responded to the ideas and designed artefacts of selected 20th Century Italian designers, architects and artists. They have provided a springboard to expand our current art, research and exhibition design practice by experimenting with unconventional media and visual approaches that inspire new connections between art and design.

In Parallel Visions visual artists Liliana Barbieri, Anna Caione, Sarina Lirosi and Wilma Tabacco show work especially created for this show by using Italian designers and artists for inspiration. Karen Fermo has designed display stands that re-interpret Giuseppe Pagano’s design for Travelling Exhibitions to showcase the parallels between designers of the past and artists of the present. Flavia Marcello worked with VR artists Casey Dalbo and Casey Richardson at Swinburne University’s Centre for Transformative Media Technologies to create a virtual reality experience that allows to you to travel back in time to the Milan Triennale exhibitions of the 1930s.

We would like to thank the support and enthusiasm from Co.As.It without whom this exhibition would not have been possible.