The exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Michelli and Vanja Strukelj, is promoted by ERPAC – Research Services, Museums and Historical Archives of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region and is one of those opportunities not to be missed for all those who study or simply appreciate Ettore Sottsass and Luigi Spazzapan , very different in origin, training, destiny. Yet closely linked by a fundamental moment of tangency.

The exhibition, thanks to the loan of about 120 works (temperas, drawings, ceramics) from the Sottsass fund conserved at the CSAC of the University of Parma, highlights undoubted consonances and crossings and the distances between the paths of the two artists . Introduced by a section entirely dedicated to Spazzapan, in which the heritage of the Gradisca Gallery is flanked by three important loans from the GAM of Turin, the exhibition itinerary winds through eight "rooms". Starting from the first trials of the young Sottsass, still enrolled in the Turin university in the late 1930s, up to all of the 1940s, the comparison between the interior projects, the sketches for fabrics and carpets, the illustrations of the pupil and the tests by the master let us discover unexpected consonances: in the energy of the sign, in the explosion of colour. At the same time, however, in these same projects iconic elements emerge, on which the architect-designer will work in the following decades: constructive grids, "mandalas" which over time take on much more complex meanings. Beyond Spazzapan's lesson, the last rooms of the exhibition aim to present precisely these different dimensions of Sottsass who will survive Spazzapan for decades and who will have the opportunity to face cultural horizons far removed from secessionist or French roots.