Creating an advertising campaign is no mean feat: making sure the message gets to your consumers is a key point, but it can often be extremely difficult to give a sort of arty touch to an advert, even when the person creating that advertising campaign is an artist and not a marketing expert. Yet, as seen in the previous post, in the history of marketing there have been extraordinary collaborations between companies and artists.
There have also been experimental partnerships that were forgotten as time passed, as it happened to the collaboration between Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri and a ceramic tile manufacturing company Marazzi.
Ghirri became familiar with the historical ceramic company in the 1930s when his family moved to Sassuolo, near Modena, where the company was founded in 1935.
In 1975 the photographer, interested in Marazzi's research and development practices, started collaborating with the company using their ceramic tiles to experiment with colours and dimensions.
This partnership – that became a proper research project involving also other photographers like John Batho, Cuchi White and Charles Traub – resulted in the production of a series of photographs in which Ghirri used the ceramic tiles as backgrounds for his paper collages or for his surreal images created with paper elements or objects in scale.
Ceramic tiles became therefore a sort of canvas on which the photographer created modernist compositions with objects like an egg, a ball, pencils and flowers (Ghirri's rose photographs are almost reminiscent for their simplicity and colours of the 1952 rose advert for the Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter).
Playing with light and colours Ghirri freed his images from the canons of mere advertising, exploring the power of common objects and of architectural surfaces, planes, grids and landscapes in design. The results are intriguing and even decades after they were originally taken, they look extremely modern, as if they were visually striking and poetic Instagram posts.
Thirty photographs from this collaboration, preserved in Marazzi's archives for nearly forty years, will be on display for the first time, at the Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo, Italy, during the event entitled "Luigi Ghirri. The Marrazzi Years 1975-1985" (16 September – October 2021), organised in partnership with the Luigi Ghirri Archive and the Marazzi Group. Hopefully, the exhibition will inspire more companies to sacrifice their logos in favour of timeless collaborations with artists.
Image credits for this post
All images in this post
Copyright © Eredi Luigi Ghirri, Courtesy Marazzi Ceramiche