Memphis - Matteo Thun

By the late 1970s, far too many forms were becoming unimaginatively predictable, as they tended to follow conventional assumptions about their functions: it was time for those assumptions to be questioned. And that was what the Memphis group did. Ettore Sottsass and his acolytes set themselves up as the movement that asked the leading questions: What does an object have to look like? Does it always have to look the same? If not, then why not do it differently? How far can we push the boundaries of form without losing function? Busily slaughtering the sacred cows of reiterative functionalism, the group set to work to create furnishings and household objects to demonstrate in practice what it propounded in theory - and the result was an unprecedented upheaval in one of the holies of holies of functional design, the Milan Furniture Fair. Matteo Thun's input was related intimately to his childhood: continuing a pastime of dabbling with clay learned in his parent's pottery factory in Bozen, he pushed the material to new extremes of language, creating limited-edition collections of ceramic tableware, Rara Avis (Rare Birds), that are now highly prized collectors items. Birds are also the yardstick in the time-honoured conundrum about the priorities between the chicken and the egg: likewise, Memphis occupies a dual role in Matteo Thun's early career as a designer, when it was both a formative influence and a case study of how his ceaselessly inquiring mind was already then revelling in the challenges of innovation and differentiation.