Joe Colombo
After his debut as a painter in the Nuclear Movement, Joe Colombo (1930-1971) established himself as a designer in the '60s. But it was his experience with painting that kept alive his imaginative attitude towards design, concentrated in little more than a decade, given his early death at 41 years old. By studying and using the most avant-garde plastic materials of the time, Colombo revolutionised canonical furnishings, projecting them into a futuristic dimension that immediately made its way into the heart of the set designers of international cinema. An example of this is his wraparound swivel armchair Elda (1963) made of plastic material moulded for Comfort Italy, an icon of the '60s that appears in films such as 007-La spia che mi amava (1977), and in the American television series Star Trek (1966-69).
