Bruno Munari, Sculture da viaggio, 1958. Fondazione Jacqueline Vodoz e Bruno Danese. Image courtesy of the Fundación Juan March.

On view through 22 May at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid is a retrospective of Bruno Munari (Milan, 1907-1998), the first ever to be presented in Spain and so far the most complete exhibition ever held, outside Italy, on this multidisciplinary artist best known as a leading figure of 20th-century design and visual communication. Munari looked for the essence of art and design in a balance between rigor and levity, always drawing from play, humor, and irony. This “collective exhibition” (as he himself titled one of his shows) features paintings, drawings, sculptures (“works of two or three dimensions,” as he liked to call them), projections and plays of light, pieces of graphic and industrial design, typographic exercises, writings, children’s books, and more.

It goes from his early works, tied to futurism and graphic design, to his last experiments in the 1990s. The exhibition and the accompanying publication are organized in areas around the methodological concepts essential to Munari’s work (time, method, levity, experimentation, contemplation), and present close to 300 works on loan from private collections and public and private institutions.

Bruno Munari, Scultura da viaggio [Escultura de viaje], 1958. CSAC. Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione, Universidad de Parma. © Bruno Munari. Maurizio Corraini. Image courtesy of the Fundación Juan March.