Light Projects

"Light must be followed without resisting.  It can only enlighten us.”

Controlling light is impossible, said Nanda Vigo. Yet, throughout her eclectic career, encompassing art, design and architecture, Vigo did nothing but explore the theme of light, using it as a material to create, in Ettore Sottsass's words, "unreal things, so transparent, non-existent and dematerialized that they are outside of time and outside of space and belong to that immense time and that more immense space that start who knows where and end who knows where".

Mediolanum bank celebrates this important artist with a retrospective at Palazzo Biandrà, in the center of Milan. Works of art, unique pieces belonging to the artist's personal collection are exhibited alongside design lamps, mass-produced and still available for sale today, but also sketches and small prototypes, which are testament to the creative process of this multifaceted personality.

Among these pieces, the JCP Universe Sun-Ra lamps certainly stand out. With their hybrid identity between art and design, the Sun-Ra lamps highlight the synthesis of Nanda Vigo’s career: the search for the interference between space and light - where the project stops being only an object and becomes an artwork. Simple lines in the space find their configuration thanks to a segment of light. Trait d'union, both concrete and conceptual, light becomes the joint element of the whole composition and declares at the same time the function of the object itself.