A key piece of the M21 Gallery’s exhibition Design Icons: Yesterday and Today is Salvador Dalí’s limited-edition work Objet Inutile, created for the Alessi Design Factory, which draws attention to the connections and borderlands between design and fine art.
The three-part exhibition is organized around this piece, presenting works by iconic international masters of design alongside collections by NUBU Studio, well known on the international fashion scene for creating a shared language between fine art and fashion.
The exhibition also features timeless design objects from the museum collection of VA Design Studio by Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Gerrit Rietveld, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, as well as postmodern works by Borek Šípek and creations by Philippe Starck, one of the star designers of the 1990s. Visitors can also see works by other cult designers associated with Alessi, including Alessandro Mendini, Zaha Hadid, Ettore Sottsass, and Frank Gehry.
Visitors to the exhibition can also become acquainted with furnishing objects created by one of the most distinctive figures of contemporary design, Karim Rashid, for the facelift project of the MaxCity Home Furnishing Shopping Center.
The Initio Arts & Design Gallery evokes the object culture of the period through its Czechoslovak and Hungarian lamps made between the 1950s and the 1980s, including works by Sándor Borz Kováts, Tamás Borsfay, Tibor Házi, Tibor Nádai, Opteam Group, Josef Hůrka, Jan Suchan, and Helena Frantová.