On the occasion of Arte Fiera 2025, Mutina presents a series of cultural initiatives where the dialogue between design and art helps to further enhance the company’'s innovative vision, creativity, and artistic research, reaffirming its role as a pioneer in the contemporary design landscape.
Ode to Things
6 February 2025 – 8 August 2025
Spazio Mutina Fiorano
On February 6, 2025, Mutina inaugurated Ode to Things a new exhibition project at Fiorano Modenese headquarters, where modern and contemporary artworks meet modern and contemporary design. The exhibition, curated by Sarah Cosulich, takes its title from the eponymous poem by Pablo Neruda—celebrating the importance of the everyday and highlighting the different approaches through which art and design interpret common objects.
Through paintings, photographs, and sculptures by seventeen artists and designers, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between different types of still lifes, suggested, constructed, inspired, or derived: vases, bottles, and glasses reflect, echo, and multiply in space, like in a fluid and apparent game of mirrors.
As in Neruda’s poem, the “"inanimate”" comes to life, and the works become figures within a stage, suggesting new narratives, between illusionism, vanitas, semantics, and the seduction of form. Images and things reveal themselves in the revolutionary possibility of imagining them, bringing forth the beauty of the ordinary within the complex landscape of human desire.
Artists and designers on display:
Ronan Bouroullec, John Currin, Filippo de Pisis, Peter Dreher, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Luigi Ghirri, Damien Hirst, Georges Jouve, Ingeborg Lundin, Aimée Moreau, Fischli/Weiss, Ed Ruscha, Ettore Sottsass, Rudolf Stingel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Goran Trbuljak, and Franco Vimercati.
Paesaggi by Nathalie Du Pasquier for APALAZZOGALLERY
7–9 February 2025
Arte Fiera Bologna
APALAZZOGALLERY presented an exhibition dedicated to the duo Eva & Franco Mattes. The artists’' works have been enhanced by the Paesaggi collection, created for Mutina by Nathalie Du Pasquier. The collectible design objects express architectural silhouettes that play with proportions, creating miniature, almost metaphysical landscapes that transport the viewer into a dimension suspended in space and time. The project explores the relationship between art and design, transforming ceramics into a poetic language that invites us to rediscover the hidden beauty of everyday objects.
Mutina for Flash Art Italia
7 February 2025Arte Fiera Bologna, Cinema Modernissimo
Mutina collaborateds with Nathalie Du Pasquier in the creation of the Flash Art Italia Award, the new award promoted by Flash Art in partnership with Arte Fiera Bologna. Aimed at becoming Italy’'s leading contemporary art award, the prize highlights the entire Italian ecosystem, recogniszing artists, gallerists, museum directors, foundations, independent spaces, territories, and companies that have distinguished themselves for the quality of their artistic research over the past year.
The award ceremony took place on Friday, February 7, at 7.00 PM, within the evocative spaces of Cinema Modernissimo.
The artwork is a reinterpretation of Brac, a three-dimensional element from the Brick family, entirely made of extruded terracotta. Unlike the original product, designed for the creation of decorative partition walls and exclusive furniture elements, the award is a unique piece, with a brush applied at its summit—a clear reference to the world of art and the uniqueness of the creative gesture.
As Cristiano Seganfreddo, co-founder of Flash Art and creator of the award, states: “It’s not just a recognition but an artwork in itself: an object that embodies the philosophy of Mutina and its author.”