Within an industrial-style loft in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, Italian design champion Patrizio Chiarparini founded Duplex in 2015. Curating pieces from iconic design brands, groundbreaking talents, and master artisans, Duplex recently revealed Utopia, an exhibition celebrating the revolutionary fervor of post World War II Italian design. 

“The fantastic achievement of Italian Design is the incredibly rich cultural transfer into mass products. The influence of these pieces is immeasurable; I like to make a parallel with the Beatles in popular music. Perhaps, in our modern advanced digitized democracies, design has lost a bit of its ingenuity and the utopian world is no longer being sought. I want this exhibit to be a tribute to the original vision that permeated the early years of Italian design,” writes Chiarparini of the show.

The exhibition includes a careful selection of furnishings from the Remasters Collection by legendary Italian brand, Acerbis. At the center of the room, the modules of Claudio Salocchi’s 1973 Free System sofa converge to create an inviting and immersive experience. The sofa is flanked by the fluffy, cylindrical Mongolian fur cushions of Nanda Vigo’s Due Più armchairs in white and rust. Vigo’s Storet chest of drawers rendered in bubblegum pink introduces bold color.  To contrast the predominantly soft, curving forms, the Napoleone Coffee Table, also by Claudio Salocchi, introduces triangular geometry in the form of glass, mirror, and lacquer.