Artemide - Ernesto Gismondi - Floor lamp (3) - Aton Terra - Iron, Plastic

The legendary Italian lighting company Artemide was founded in the province of Milan in 1959 by designer and engineer Ernesto Gismondi, born in Sanremo in 1931, and by designer Sergio Mazza, born in Milan in 1931. As is well known, it was Mazza who designed, a year before Artemide’s launch, the Alfa Lamp, the company’s first success. In the following decades both founders continued creating new designs for Artemide’s ever-evolving collections, whose goal was to develop distinctive lamps that would catch the eye, including ceiling and pendant lamps, in collaboration with the world’s leading design talents.

Among the many best-selling pieces from Artemide’s vast catalog are: the Eclisse (1967) Space Age by Vico Magistretti and the minimal electro-luminescent desktop lamp Tizio (1972) by Italian-German designer Michele De Lucchi, which has become one of the most popular office accessories ever produced. The 1980s witnessed the launch of Tolomeo Lamp (1987), designed by Italians and Giancarlo Fassina, which soon became an international symbol of the “Made in Italy” design style that dominated the design scene at the end of the last century. Today Artemide continues to commission high-tech and highly conceptual works—ever more with a sustainability focus—from renowned international designers, including, among others, Herzog & De Meuron, Naoto Fukasawa, Karim Rashid, and Zaha Hadid. Over the decades, many of Artemide’s lighting designs have been awarded by the prestigious Compasso d’Oro, and the company itself won the “Career Achievement” award in 1995.

For more than 50 years Artemide’s approach has set the pace for design innovation with sought-after products that have often appeared on the pages of books dealing with design history. Many pieces have been acquired by museum collections around the world, from MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.