You are currently viewing Cappellini: CAP-NEWS | January 2025 | Celebrating 50 years of Homage to Mondrian

Cappellini: CAP-NEWS | January 2025 | Celebrating 50 years of Homage to Mondrian

Homage to Mondrian is one of the most famous projects by Shiro Kuramata, an outstanding Japanese designer with whom Cappellini has collaborated throughout its history. Designed in 1975, this container, which pays homage to the paintings of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, has been part of the Cappellini collection since 2009, stressing the close bond between the brand and the world of art.
Homage to Mondrian means extreme formal purity. Each door and drawer has a different size, to adapt to the various objects it can store.
Like all of Kuramata’s projects, it is an extremely modern product, a piece in the collections of the main national and international museums.

“Piet Mondrian. Dalla figurazione all’astrazione”, MUDEC Milan 2021 – Ph. Carlotta Coppo

It was 1985: Giulio Cappellini on his first trip to Japan saw the products of the great Shiro Kuramata for the first time and fell in love with them. With the idea of including them in the Cappellini collection, with the help of his friend Ettore Sottsass, he tried to get in touch with Shiro by sending him letters for months, until he received a reply: “Dear Mr Cappellini, I am very happy because today the cherry trees are in bloom”. That sentence marked the beginning of a ten-year collaboration, first with Shiro Kuramata and, after the premature death of the designer in 1991, with the Foundation that took his name.

Portrait of Shiro Kuramata, 1990 – Ph. Takayuki Ogawa

Cappellini Collections: https://camstudioid.com/cappellini