Casa Malaparte

In the wildest, most solitary and dramatic part of Capri, in the part which faces the south and east, where the island loses its human quality and become ferocious, where nature expresses itself with an incomparable, cruel strength, there was a promontory of an extraordinary purity of line, a rocky claw flung into the sea.
—Curzio Malaparte

Gagosian is pleased to present editions of furniture pieces from Casa Malaparte, in an exhibition opening on September 14, 2022.

Constructed on an isolated promontory on the rugged eastern coast of Capri, Italy, Casa Malaparte is a unique exemplar of twentieth-century Italian architecture. The visionary residence was designed in 1938 by Curzio Malaparte (the pseudonym of Kurt Erich Suckert), a provocative writer, editor, and intellectual active in the Italian literary and artistic avant-garde who was notorious for his oscillations between the ideological extremes of the era. Malaparte completed the home in 1941, realizing a strikingly spare design incorporating a trapezoidal exterior staircase that leads to a broad terrace overlooking the luscious green of maritime pine trees, the buff tones of limestone cliffs, and the aqueous blues of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Combining an austere modernism with interpretations of classical elements, Casa Malaparte exhibits a decidedly personal and poetic sensibility, leading its creator to declare the structure to be casa come me—a “house like me.”

The assertive sculptural presence of the house’s design extends to its interior and furniture, which Malaparte designed and which remains in situ. Its salon is renowned for its stone flooring; the expansive, irregularly placed windows that frame vistas of the sublime site; and its most iconic pieces of furniture. Famously featured as a primary setting of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt), Casa Malaparte has inspired generations of architects, designers, and artists, and is today preserved and used as a private home by the heirs.

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