ANTIQUE POLYCHROME CERAMIC PARADE PLATE ALBISOLA GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTI EARLY 20TH CENTURY
This listing presents a ceramic or majolica parade plate made and painted over enamel faithfully respecting the ancient and traditional Albisola styles of the fire masters of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The large parade plate was made by the famous workshop of Giuseppe Mazzotti of Albisola and measures 43 cm.
Albisola is steeped in history, creativity and art.
The art of know-how that belongs to ceramic craftsmanship.
There is something extraordinary in the DNA of the territory.
In Albisola the production of ceramics began in the 15th century, developing into pictorial styles mainly of blue colors on a white background.
Albisola, which during the nineteenth century lived by producing terracotta pots, which the ceramists left to dry on the beach beaten by the north wind, transformed during the twentieth century. It became the world capital of ceramic art and on 10 August 1963 it inaugurated the Lungomare degli Artisti, a synthesis of the artistic twentieth century, a unique and extraordinary walkable strip 800 meters long that separates the beach from the houses overlooking the sea with an uninterrupted mosaic designed by artists such as Lucio Fontana, just to name one.
Albisola was the actress of history.
During the twentieth century on the banks of the Sasobbia, a local stream that descends from the slopes of Mount Beigua, two extraordinary, alchemical and powerful events changed the world's ceramic art.
The arrival of the Futurist Movement led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the International Ceramics Meetings of 1954.
Both events took place within the walls of the Mazzotti furnaces.
The first promoted by my great uncle Tullio d'Albisola.
The second conceived by Sergio Dangelo and Enrico Baj, founders of the Nuclear Movement. Dangelo arrived in Albisola aboard a Fiat 500 Topolino driven by Aligi Sassu the year before.
Aligi Sassu was then Councilor for Culture in the council led by mayor Giuseppe Ciarlo and promoter of the construction of the Lungomare degli Artisti.
Futurism in the 1930s he freed ceramics from traditional production by inserting bizarre, free, violent shapes in volumes and colours.
He affirmed a forerunner of design, having the ceramics designed by exponents of the artistic movement, who were not ceramists.
But ideators and idealists do. It was an epochal transition.
In the 1950s, precisely in 1954, “The International Ceramics Meetings” they made the history of ceramic art take another leap forward. The representatives of the Co.Br.A. Group Copenhagen Brussels Amsterdam, invited to the Mazzotti factory for the event created by Dangelo and Baj, freed the ceramic material from the concept of applied art, using it no longer as an element to create mass-produced artefacts, but to create unique and unrepeatable works.
All this happened because there were craftsmen capable of doing their job, of looking ahead, of being far-sighted entrepreneurs.
This happened here at the mouth of the Sansobbia stream.
Not to forget the deep bond with the artists who frequented the factory such as (just to name a few): Lucio Fontana, Aligi Sassu, Ernesto Treccani, Milena Milani, Ignazio Moncada, Mimmo Rotella, Aurelio Caminati, Sandro Cherchi, Hsiao Chin, Emanuele Luzzati, Giancarlo Sangregorio, Luigi Veronesi, Asgar Elde, Giorgio Moiso, Gianni Celano Giannici, Roger Selden, Ugo Nespolo, Adriano Leverone, Giorgio Laveri, Alfredo Sosabravo, Sandro Lorenzini, Hugo Shaer, Guido Giordano, Franco Corradini and so many others that it becomes impossible list them all up to the most recent young people such as Alessandro Neretti, Alessandro Roma and Arianna Carossa.
Also worth mentioning is the collaboration with Italian and international designers starting in 1992 with Alessandro Mendini for Memphis, continuing in 2012 for The Gallery in Brussels with Damine Bihr, Alain Berteau, Nicolas Bovesse, Jean-Francois D'Or, Nathalie Dewez, Christian Hogner , Hugo Meert and, for other initiatives, with Ambrogio Pozzi, Luca Scacchetti, Ugo La Pietra, Rolando Giovannini, Giulio Iacchetti, Gum Design, Maria Christina Hamel, Alberto Pode and other authors