Untitled, 1968-1973

The present lot is registered in the library of the Museo Casa Mollino, Turin, as number CM-1280.

Christie's wishes to thank Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, Museo Casa Mollino, Turin, for their assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.

An enthusiastic and talented photographer, Mollino had since the 1930s remained fascinated by the medium’s potential to manipulate the position of vantage – that could be altered or adapted to yield alternative options for ambiguous interpretation. The photographic collages of the Ippica architectural complex, or the surrealistic interior compositions of the late 1930s, reveal Mollino’s conceptual, aesthetic and textural motivations as clearly as any of his physical structures – architecture or furniture. Mollino’s photographs of the early 1930s attained perfection through the often laborious and time-consuming process of staging or styling the subject or composition, the complex technical processes of the actual image-making, and any eventual hand-craft, by means of annotation, cropping or collage that ensued. Consequently, for a creative spirit as Mollino, the introduction of Polaroid cameras during the 1950s and their immediate delivery of a single, unique and inalterable image offered a basic yet effective process by which the styling of the imagery became the primary intent of the photographer.

Between around 1960 and his death in 1973, Mollino took hundreds of monochrome, then colour Polaroid photographs of models artfully posed in elaborately styled interiors – many of which were taken within the apartment that he created, yet never lived in, on via Napione, Turin. These Polaroids were a clandestine portfolio, never exhibited or published at the time, and only occasionally would one be released to grace a Christmas or birthday card to a dear friend. The posing of the models is deliberate and considered – they are aware of the photographer's presence, their posture responding, their gaze often direct. But, the staging of context is carefully styled as if to appear intuitive – an improbable moment surprised, yet one that is in fact meticulously calibrated. While the models demand the primary focus, it is very often the props, the costumes, and the backgrounds that distract and perplex – the folds of a curtain or the drape of lace, as revealing as a clamshell or a just-lit candle, a fireplace as metaphor, or the inertia of a chair awakened by touch. As always with Mollino, there is no direct route, no immediate direction or signpost – rather these Polaroids are series of signals and ciphers, designed to resonate with the suggestion of opaque narratives.