Giuseppe Scapinelli

Giuseppe Scapinelli was born in Modena in 1911. Born into an Italian aristocratic family, he trained as an architect and moved from Italy to Brazil in 1948. There he worked as an architect for Count Francesco Matarazzo, the Italian-Brazilian entrepreneur who founded the São Paulo Art Museum and initiated the Biennale of the same name. At the time, Scapinelli was in contact with all the prominent Paulistas and worked for the city's most important families. In 1950 he set up his own design studio and began to promote a modern style without abandoning the classical principles he had learnt in Italy. An article dedicated to him in the magazine Casa & Jardin (no. 10, 1954) described him as "a classicist who does not forget to be modern, or, if you prefer, a modernist who does not forget to be classical". In the energetic and flowing lines of his work, one can sense his admiration for nature and his desire to channel its forces through the efforts of reason to the service of mankind. Although such aspirations found their logical expression on a global scale in the intense industrialisation of the world, Scapinelli himself avoided mass production throughout his career, preferring to make his furniture with craftsmen who had emigrated from Italy. At the end of the 1960s, Giuseppe Scapinelli, who did not want to compete with the fast-moving and cheap products of the large furniture factories, turned to painting and ceramics.

«The room should breathe, and the furniture should serve this breathing, be an extension of it.»