From Nov. 19 to Dec. 2025, Carrozzeria900, a Milanese space dedicated to design and modern antiques, presents the exhibition Mario Ceroli | Domestic Theater, a project that explores the artist’s activity in the field of design through the reconstruction of a furnishing environment made with his famous furniture. The opening is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 18, at 6 p.m., in the spaces at 64 Via Teodosio. Active since 2011, Carrozzeria900 has become a reference point for those looking for design objects and accessories with a strong historical and artisanal imprint. On this occasion, the space offers an itinerary dedicated to Mario Ceroli, born in 1938, a central figure inItalian art of the second half of the 20th century, best known for his sculptures and installations but also for his theater, film and television sets. However, the exhibition aims to focus on a lesser-known aspect of his work: the production of furniture and furnishings, an important part of his research that reveals the continuity between art, craftsmanship and everyday life.
“Industry has rediscovered the furniture I designed for myself,” declares Mario Ceroli. “The sensitivity given to a product like mine, which is less comfortable than a furniture object designed by an interior designer, is a different sensitivity. In a furniture object designed by a designer, it is a different thing. In the designer’s furniture, the relationship between the object and the person is missing. In my furniture you find this kind of relationship, perhaps also because of this lack of comfort...the use of raw wood contributes to this relationship. These furnishings are, for me, sculptures to touch, to use. This is the relationship with my furniture.”
Ceroli, who has always been linked to manual skill and matter, has created numerous pieces of furniture over the years in wood, materials that he considers endowed with their own vitality and capable of transformation over time. Tables, chairs, armchairs and beds become for the artist tools for investigating form and perception, in which practical function coexists with a symbolic and visual language. Teatro domestico intends to restore this dimension, reconstructing an inhabited space in which objects assume the role of protagonists of a silent scene, capable of narrating the relationship between matter, space and memory.
The exhibition core revolves around the Mobili della Valle series, designed by Ceroli in the 1970s for the companyPoltronova and handcrafted from Russian pine wood. The furniture originally came from a country house, where it had been purchased by the previous owners, collectors and design enthusiasts. After the house was sold, the furniture came to Carrozzeria900, which decided to dedicate an exhibition tribute to them, reconstructing an interior in which each piece finds its natural location. The installation restores the objects’ original function and enhances their poetic meaning, transforming the gallery space into a domestic theater populated with symbolic presences. On display are chairs, tables, sofas, a chest of drawers, an armchair and the frame of a bed, all belonging to the Furniture of the Valley collection.
The series takes inspiration from a cycle of twenty paintings by Giorgio De Chirico, in which the artist places ordinary objects in unreal scenarios, generating a sense of suspension that leads one to reflect on the symbolic function of furniture as an archetype of domestic intimacy. Ceroli translates this suggestion into plastic terms, placing the furniture on a plane of perceptual ambiguity, where the object retains its utility but opens up to a metaphysical dimension. The espaliered chairs, with their elongated forms, evoke dechirican mannequins, while the tables decorated with a compass rose evoke a sense of sacred and proportionate order, close to the classical and medieval world. In them one can recognize the technical precision of the craftsman, attentive to the sanding and interlocking of the wood. The chests of drawers, sofas and armchairs present a balance between solids and voids that lets the material vibrate, while the bed, with its anthropomorphic decoration, alludes to the great furniture structures of antiquity.
A wooden sculpture representing a sun outside a window completes the display, an element that introduces subtle visual irony and amplifies the dialogue between reality and fiction. All the furniture on display, while maintaining a domestic function, becomes part of a larger narrative system, where each surface, shadow or projection contributes to the construction of a scene poised between stillness and movement. In Domestic Theater, Ceroli addresses the theme of living as an aesthetic and mental experience. The artist transforms space into a stage where forms evoke presences and memories, suggesting that every element of the everyday environment holds a story. The installation at Carrozzeria900 thus invites a reflection on the relationship between art and design, between the object and the observer, between the artist’s gesture and the life that inhabits his works.
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| Mario Ceroli and his "Domestic Theater": the art of living on display at Carrozzeria900 |
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