10·Corso·Como Presents Roe Ethridge & Pietro Consagra

10·Corso·Como presents
Gallery and Project Room

10 Corso Como unveils its newly redesigned Gallery and Project Room, reflecting Tiziana Fausti’s vision and executed by the interdisciplinary agency 2050+. The space now embodies a concept of “selective archaeology,” stripping away accumulated materials to reveal the original industrial character of the early 20th century. The renovation features movable walls, pantograph tables, and grandstands, facilitating versatility while maintaining a hybrid Wunderkammer design.

The Gallery showcases American artist Roe Ethridge’s exhibition “Happy Birthday Louise Parker,” curated by Alessandro Rabottini, displaying over thirty iconic photographs and large-scale works for the first time in Italy. Meanwhile, the Project Room functions as an adaptable space for exploring contemporary themes such as sustainability, activism, and human relations through archival research and technological innovation.

A highlight of the Project Room is the debut exhibition of Pietro Consagra’s face and body jewelry curated by Alessio de’Navasques, featuring pieces like Masks in silver and gold, the Bite in red gold, Eyebrow Ornament, and Navel Ornament alongside precious archival documents. This exhibition coincides with “The Alchemical Plane,” showcasing signature design pieces and rare books selected by Domitilla Dardi.

Tiziana Fausti expresses pride in initiating 10 Corso Como’s cultural program with innovative reflections on fashion, photography, art, and design. The redesigned spaces aim to serve as a dynamic platform for discussions on sustainability, human relations, art, fashion, and culture, embodying Fausti’s forward-looking vision for the concept store she acquired in 2020.

Pietro Consagra. Ornamenti

Curated by Alessio de’ Navasques, reconstructs a particular phase in Consagra’s practice: his collection of masks and body ornaments produced in 1969 in collaboration with the art jewelry workshop GEM GianCarlo Montebello.

Internationally renowned as the master of Italian abstractionism, Consagra – one of the founders of the Forma 1 group – designed and made pieces of jewelry throughout his career: from his first necklace, made in 1947 using sheet brass, which (as he himself claimed) served almost as a wearable manifesto for abstract art, through to his collaborations with Mario Masenza and the brothers Massimo and Danilo Fumanti. It was in the vibrant milieu of 1960s Milan that Consagra first encountered Giancarlo Montebello. Together, alongside the more traditional pieces featuring motifs and designs similar to those of sculpture, they created a series of conceptual ornaments in which the conceptual and political symbolism of the mask is expressed through the arrangement of the shapes on the wearer’s face.

Within the creative forge that was GEM, Consagra created ornaments for the face and body that transcended any purely aesthetic purpose. These included subtle interweavings of gold, silver, and stones, crown-masks, and bridles, all of which gave a new, fantastical appearance to the face and alluded to women’s revolt against the stereotypes assigned to them by the male-dominated society of the time, on the crest of a provocation that also had its playful side. The ornaments ended with a rod at mouth height, which looked almost like a bit but was both suspended and mobile; moreover, without forcing the point, it betrayed an ironic, sensual vein.

For the first time at 10·Corso·Como, the jewelry series for face and body has been brought together: the two Maschere (“Masks”) in silver and red gold, one with turquoise spheres, the other with spheres of amethyst and chalcedony; and Morso (“Bit”) in red gold and coral spheres; as well as Ornamento per sopracciglio (“Eyebrow Ornament”) and Ornamento per ombelico (“Navel Ornament”) with the two-piece detachable silver Cache-sexe. Alongside contemporary documents, essays, and publications from the Pietro Consagra Archive in Milan, the GEM Montebello catalog box compiles, like a deck of cards, rare photos by Ugo Mulas, the Milanese photographer whose black-and-white images captured Benedetta Barzini “wearing” the jewels. These shots soon became iconic; so much so, in fact, that they caught the eye of Consuelo Crespi – Vogue USA’s fashion editor – and were then published in Vogue Italia’s January 1970 issue, shown here.

In an exhibition design that makes its way through thematic islands, we come to the 1968 sculpture Spessori in prospettiva (“Thicknesses in Perspective”), a type of Inventari (“Inventories”) in which Consagra physically projected frontal images in an extension that resulted in a visual shift. These works foreshadow the buildings of La Città Frontale (“The Frontal City”) – devised by Consagra in the same year – and also reappeared in the Ornamento per sopracciglio, in the form of movable rods that terminated in a star, a circle, a square, a triangle, and a hexagon, veiling the eyes but not compromising the ability to see – in fact, actually providing a symbolic indication of a change in the woman’s perspective.

The two versions of the Cache-sexe mark the end of the exhibition route: one put together by Montebello and the other (probably a prototype) encapsulating more explicitly how even a body ornament can conceal an idea of female liberation, through an object that gives pleasure with no requirement for male input.

The mystique of the jeweled mask, archetypal enigma, became at once the symbol and the core of the seemingly irreducible contradiction in the male-female relationship: “An awareness of the reality that flows between people, and which for me is indispensable in removing the dead spots of a culture that moves forward on male consciousness alone,” as Lonzi wrote in Vai Pure, responding to Consagra.