Pirro Cuniberti, a designer famous for the ‘PR’ floor lamp made for the firm Sirrah in 1970, has died age 92, Artforum reports. As well as a designer, Cuniberti was a painter of delicate and eccentric abstractions whose later works call to mind the works of Giorgio Griffa. He graduated from Bologna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1948, where he studied under Giovanni Romagnoli and Giorgio Morandi. In the same year, he went to the first Venice Biennale after World War II and came upon Paul Klee — whose work had a great influence on his artistic career. In 1957 Cuniberti had his first solo exhibition at the Circolo Culturale in Bologna.
Other key exhibitions for Cuniberti include the Quadriennale of Rome in 1965 and 1972; the XII Premio Spoleto in 1966; a survey at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara in 1991; and another survey at Bologna’s Museo Archeologico in 2003, which ended up traveling to the Casa del Mantegna in Mantova that same year. His first major solo exhibition in the United States was at New York’s ESSO Gallery in 2008.
7 March 2016.
