Background
Nanda Vigo was born on November 14, 1936 in Milan, Lombardia, Italy.
Institut Polytechnique of Lausanne
Lucio Fontana. Photo from the collection of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana.
Lucio Fontana. Photo from the collection of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana.
Nanda Vigo was born on November 14, 1936 in Milan, Lombardia, Italy.
Nanda Vigo graduated from the Institut Polytechnique of Lausanne.
Nanda Vigo showed interest in art from an early age when she had the opportunity to spend time in the company of Filippo de Pisis, a family friend, and to observe the architectures of Giuseppe Terragni from which she learned the attention to the light.
After an important internship in San Francisco in 1959, Vigo opened her own studio in Milan. From that moment on the essential theme of her art became the conflict and harmony between light and space, which the artist uses in his work, even as an architect or designer. From 1959 she attended the study of Lucio Fontana first, and then approached the artists who founded the Azimut gallery in Milan, Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani. In that period, among the various exhibitions for the whole of Europe (more than 400 collective and personal exhibitions), Vigo got to know the artists and the places of the ZERO movement in Germany, Netherlands, and France.
In 1959 Nanda began designing the ZERO house in Milan, completed only in 1962. Between 1964 and 1966 she participated in at least thirteen ZERO exhibitions, including "NUL 65" at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and "ZERO: An Exhibition of European Experimental Art" at the Gallery of Modern Art of Washington D.C. In 1965 the artist took part in the legendary exhibition ZERO avantgarde in Lucio Fontana's studio in Milan, with the participation of more than 28 artists.
In 1971 Vigo was awarded the New York Award for Industrial Design for its lamp development (Golden Gate Lamp) and in the same year she designed and realized one of her most spectacular projects for the Remo Brindisi House-Museum in Lido di Spina. In 1976 she won the 1st St. Gobain Prize for glass design and in 1982 took part in the 40th Venice Biennale. In 1997 Vigo edited the exhibition "Piero Manzoni - Milan and Mythology" at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Since 2006 works by Vigo are permanently at the Triennale Design Museum.
In her activity, Vigo works with an interdisciplinary relationship between art, design, architecture and the environment, and is involved in many projects both as an architect and designer and as an artist. What distinguishes her lively career is the attention and research of the art, which pushes her to open collaborations with the most significant figures of our time and to always undertake projects aimed at enhancing the art as the exhibition "ITALIAN ZERO & avantgarde 60's" at the MAMM Museum in Moscow.
From April 2013 some works by Vigo are present in the collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from 2014 - 2015 to the Guggenheim in New York and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin as part of the events dedicated to ZERO. She currently lives and works between Milan and East Africa.
Quotations:
"I am meticulous and have a strong temperament. I always say what needs to be said. And I am proud. You must keep in mind that I, like other women, grew up in a male-dominated culture. No other expression was possible. Either your character emerged or it was a no-go."
" We need to stop and re-align our priorities and, starting from history, try to achieve another aesthetic expression of design."
Nanda Vigo was a member of Zero Group.
Nanda Vigo is described as a sophisticated intellectual of space, an explorer who knows the language of space to evade that of words, form, and color and penetrate only in it.
