Gufram - Massolo low table

“Not a rock or a natural stony ground anymore, but a block already contaminated by man’s hand, who started to polish the shining material. To the observing eye it has an enormous weight… but when touched it has a light and elastic mass. It provides a threedimensional trompe-l’oeil effect, meant to induce a playful experience even in the space of domestic everyday life”. cit. Piero Gilardi. In this way the author personally describes Massolo, which can at first sight look like a heavy block of porphyry, etched and polished on the surface - an immovable boulder that, thanks to the polyurethane it is made of, loses weight and can be moved with ease. It is another design paradox of Gufram’s, that suggests a playful object capable of dematerializing a heavy volume into an original story. An amusing visual and tactile snare for the guests, which can be used as a coffee-table, a seat with character, or displayed as a multiple piece of art by one of the most original Italian artists.

Piero Gilardi

Piero Gilardi was born in Turin in 1942 and studied at the Art School and at the Accademia Albertina in Turin.
A pioneer in the technological art experience, in the 60’s Gilardi was one of the protagonists of the Nouveau Realisme and the European Pop Art. In 1963 he realised his first private exhibit “Machines For the Future”; two years later he conceived the first pieces in polyurethane foam for Gufram, and started to display his works in several cultural poles in the world — among them Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Hamburg, Amsterdam and New York.
From 1968 he adhered to the new artistic trends of the period — Arte Povera, Land Art, Anti-form Art, — and collaborated at the realization of some international reviews.

Gufram

Gufram is an Interior Design Italian brand globally known for pushing the limits of industrial design. With its Radical Design spirit and its nonconformist experimentation linked to aesthetic, technological and material research, Gufram has created seats and interior design icons that have entered collective imagination: playful, subversive and desecrating products with a POP soul, willingly designed as anti-design items. Gufram was born in Turin as an artisanal entity, where the craftsmen specialized in upholstery, cabinet making and furniture padding met the artistic and international avant-garde with the goal to give birth to a new way of understanding modern furniture. Since 1966 Gufram has been producing design icons that have become unique in form and value thanks to the cross-contamination between the industrial design approach, the artisanal creation and the imaginative flair typical of art. Gufram's unmistakable furniture items like the couch Bocca, the chaise lounge Pratone and the hall tree Cactus (just to name a few), also known as Domestic Sculptures able to interpret the contact point between both the artistic and the design worlds, are now displayed in the most beautiful houses and in the most renowned museums in the world.