Gio Ponti was the artist who transformed Richard-Ginori’s production more than any other: the factory’s art director from 1923 to 1930, he implemented a complete revitalization that included the shapes and decorations of the ceramics as well as the graphic design of the catalogues, posters, commercial photographs and logos of the various different product lines. In 1925 at the Paris International Exposition of Decorative Arts, Ponti’s ceramics received the most prestigious prize, the Grand Prix. The boldest of all the surrealists, his eclectic works revisited and confidently expressed Art Nouveau designs, whilst also displaying influences from neoclassicism, Etruscan art and even esotericism.

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Gariboldi started working with Gio Ponti in 1928, and from 1930 to 1970 he provided designs for the ceramics factory. From 1946 onwards he was director of Richard-Ginori’s Artistic Centre. In this period he adapted the functional shapes and details of everyday objects to new daily lifestyles and smaller living spaces, making pieces that were more compact and which could be dismantled, as well as standardising series. He always worked with unconstrained yet meticulous originality: it was his Ulpia service which was presented at the 1954 Triennale. The sobriety and conceptual capacity of many of his creations make them seem modern even today (such as ‘gli impilabili’, the stackables, which won the Compasso d’Oro award.

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Franco Albini was one of the most important people in Italian design: a pioneer of new formal and aesthetic sensibilities. The son of an engineer, he received his degree in architecture in 1929 at Milan Polytechnic. While travelling around Europe, he met and associated with masters such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He soon came into contact with the Casabella circle (in 1932 he met Edoardo Persico), which at that time played a crucial role in Italian Rationalist architecture. Albini worked as both architect and designer throughout his career, particularly focusing on furniture design. His clean lines created minimalist shapes which merged the very essence of the elements used with suggestions of poetic, dream-like worlds. The objects which Albini designed for Richard-Ginori are ‘pieces’ in their own right, with their own intrinsic, secret souls: they are real, yet they transcend reality. They are ‘traces of stories’ which bring their symbolic and functional value into living spaces.

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