This is the third installment of our new Designing Women series. Previously, we profiled Marianne Brandt and Belle Kogan.
Nanda Vigo's website is a great place to start a cosmic journey—UFOs streak across the page, stars ricochet, intergalactic transmissions ping to life, and your navigation button is an icon of the USS Enterprise. Much like Vigo's physical creations, it's an idiosyncratic exploration of the future with a dash of pop culture.
Vigo, who is now 79 years old and still working, has been pursuing designs based on something she calls "chronotopical" theory—from the Greek for "time-space"—since starting her Milan-based studio in 1959. I can't pretend to entirely understand her theory (it has to do with "the continuous and complete understanding of man beyond the form," if that helps); suffice to say that Vigo wants to activate and enhance the viewer's sensory perception of space and time—often through the use of industrial materials like glass, mirror and neon.
Over her six-decade career, Vigo's work has spanned light fixtures, interiors, architecture, furniture and conceptual light-art installations. Her earliest works from the 1960s, called Cronotops, are structures of glass, aluminum, mirror and neon that reflect and diffract light. With these works, she found a kinship with the German group Zero and its worldwide network of artists, who sought to redefine the post–World War II visual landscape. (For more on Zero, see the Guggenheim's recent exhibition ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, which included Vigo's Cronotops.)
Beginning in the late '60s, Vigo began to take on commercial lighting commissions, including several light fixtures for Kartell; acclaimed designs for Arredoluce like the Golden Gate, Iceberg and Utopia fixtures; and, in the '80s, her Light Trees for Lumi.
Tables, chairs, mirrors, rugs and household objects would follow, all of them imbued with Vigo's space-age eclecticism. Standouts included a sleek suite of glass-and-mirror furniture for FAI International and the tubular-steel-and-faux-fur Due Più chairs for Conconi.
Vigo also applied her radical vision to architecture and interior commissions, most famously in a museum-home in Lido di Spina, Italy, for the artist and collector Remo Brindisi. Domus called the structure a "dwelling museum," as it allowed Brindisi to live amongst his collection of 1,800 works of contemporary art—displayed in Vigo's appropriately avant-garde setting of white-tiled walls, mirrors, neon lights and mirrored furniture.
Arguably, her grooviest commission was an interior for a 1964 Gio Ponti house named Lo Scarabeo Sotto La Foglia (The Beetle Under the Leaves). Here, her signature white-tiled walls and floors created a monochromatic backdrop for interior elements clad in so much shaggy fur that they could be mistaken for props from the set of Barbarella. Other interiors completed by Vigo expanded on this monochromatic theme, limiting each space to a single color.
Still creating and exhibiting today, Vigo showed her latest series of light art, Deep Space, earlier this year in Genoa, alongside some of her older pieces. Her multidisciplinary work continues to unveil new universes of experience, or as one critic recently put it, "vibrations of the invisible world."
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