Sawaya & Moroni - Drinking glass (6) - Crystal

Six beautifully paper-thin Sawaya & Moroni crystal water glasses, Italy circa 2000. In their original box, with reinforced padding.

Dimensions in cm (H x D): 8.2 x 9.3

New glasses, box with signs of use.

Secure shipping.

Sawaya & Moroni emerged on the international design scene in 1984 relatively quickly, combining the professional talent of architect and designer William Sawaya with the entrepreneurship of Paolo Moroni. The company is now established as a manufacturer of high-quality design furniture.

Both partners come from areas unrelated to furniture, so the lack of family tradition to be respected and passed down—typical of this area—becomes a positive element, free from all conceptual and productive restrictions. Thanks to this freedom, a collection of limited editions signed by the great protagonists of contemporary architecture, design, and art has been born, along with a multitude of furniture, silverware, and artifacts that have found a place in private collections and design museums around the world.

Every product has a story. Over the course of our century, artistic values have gradually seeped into various fields, leading to the attribution of artistic significance to many objects originally designed for other purposes. The extremes of aesthetically inclined transformations of nearly any object and product can be found in different artistic movements. One of these is Dada, which paradoxically invited viewers to see the most everyday industrial products as works of art. Another is Pop Art, which directed the flow of media images and mass consumption products toward the realm of art. In Italy, we also had the Poor Art movement, whose goal was to use art to salvage even the least valuable cast-offs of industrial society, such as the poor materials of iron, paper, and brick.

The wisdom of hindsight demonstrates the logic behind these developments: with a certain degree of arrogance, artistic quality was attributed by the market in opposition to the material value of the work and above all in contrast to the actual effort involved in achieving the final result. This was certainly one of the more unreasonable and provocative phenomena of our age, as art seemed to have become a way of attributing an excessive value (primarily aesthetic, but as a consequence also economic) to an object that had very little intrinsic value in terms of materials, technique, and work.

Today's presentation of a collection of artistic silver pieces is therefore a challenge to this attitude. Each object in the collection—whether a candlestick or a fruit bowl, a tray or a carafe—is practically unique, strongly individual, and exceptional, unlike the 'multiple' approach and the widespread technical reproducibility so often used and abused in the arts. But in this collection of silver, it is not so much the quality of the material that defines the character of the product as the accumulation of a long, slow, complex process of elaboration and work, an approach that upends the concept of attributing value to a work of art in a purely arbitrary way, by conferring aesthetic status on technically poor objects created without any mastery.

Every one of these silver objects has the uniqueness of a prototype, as each is practically handmade. Although production is preceded by a detailed design study, the results are achieved individually through the complex process of hand craftsmanship, down to the tiniest detail. The architects and designers who created the collection are well-known and highly authoritative. However, the contribution of the craftsmen in transforming the design into a product is equally significant and authoritative, even if they are less well-known. Although these pieces are the result of layer upon layer of profound design conception, craftsmanship, and artistic care that make them worthy of display in a museum, this does not mean they neglect their functional objectives: an authentic work of art need not fear being used.

A tray or a candlestick made in this way is a 'noble' object and a work of art by virtue of this way of blending the conceptual design and the creative process. In this way, each of these silver objects tells a story. These are not pieces designed once and for all and then mass-produced by an industry that uses contemporary artistic misunderstandings to spread and increase their value.

The pieces presented here are all unique, each with its own story to tell: the story that has led them to their visible result, just like the portrait each of us has of ourselves, which reflects how we have developed as individual human beings.

The brand Sawaya & Moroni is mainly known for its research and conceptual design, as well as for its daring collaborations with architects such as Jean Nouvel, Daniel Libeskind, Dominique Perrault, Michael Graves, OM Ungers, Massimiliano Fuksas, Zaha Hadid, Charles Jencks, Kazuo Shinohara, Ettore Sottsass, Adolfo Natalini, Jakob + MacFarlane, Hani Rashid, Mario Bellini, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, and also for design projects signed by William Sawaya from designers or artists such as Ron Arad, Michael Young, Richard Hutten, John Maeda, Toshiyuki Kita, Borek Sipek, Toni Cordero, Platt + Young, Christian Ghion, Mario Cananzi, Jeannot Cerutti, Terry Dwan, Matt Sindall, Veit Streitenberger, Luigi Serafini, Marco Mencacci, Tim Watson, Setsu + Shinobu Ito, and others.