VENETIAN ECHOES | Marta Bastianello design MISE EN ABYME | Aptitude Object

MARTA BASTIANELLO PRESENTS ”Venetian Echoes |Framing Light and Matter” Alberto Levi Gallery, Milan | 17-30 April 2026 To celebrate Milan Design Week 2026, Italian architect and designer Marta Bastianello unveils a defining new chapter in her practice with Venetian Echoes | Framing Light and Matter. Conceived for Alberto Levi Gallery, the installation transforms the historic Milanese space into a contemporary Venetian interior - immersive, atmospheric and rigorously composed. After more than three decades shaping refined private residences in Italy and abroad, Bastianello formally launches Marta Bastianello Design Milano, crystallising a research trajectory that has long run parallel to her architectural work. The bespoke furnishings she has historically designed for her interiors now emerge as an autonomous collection of furniture, lighting and rugs - presented publicly for the first time. Created especially for Fuorisalone 2026, the project comprises thirty-four previously unseen pieces developed with a distinctly curatorial sensibility. Each work results from close dialogue with master artisans and leading Italian manufactures, including long-standing collaborators Alberto Levi, Rubelli and Micheluzzi - names synonymous with textile excellence and Venetian glassmaking heritage. Venice Beyond Nostalgia Rather than drawing on Venice as aesthetic nostalgia, Venetian Echoes positions the city as an intellectual and material framework. Rooted in the culture of the bottega - where thinking happens through making, and detail becomes architecture - the collection reflects a disciplined pursuit of balance: between light and density, opacity and luminosity, structure and ornament. Bastianello's deeply personal connection to Venice informs the work not as stylistic reference, but as spatial philosophy. The result is a series of pieces defined by sculptural proportion and material intensity. Surfaces are layered, tactile and quietly dramatic; forms are measured yet expressive. Together, they construct an environment in which craftsmanship becomes narrative and material becomes language. With Venetian Echoes, Bastianello moves beyond the domestic interior to articulate a broader design vision - one that speaks to the international conversation around collectible design, authorship and the renewed relevance of artisanal intelligence in contemporary practice. MISE EN ABYME OBJECTS FROM SPACES Mis en abyme is a device in which an image contains itself, or a variation of itself, generating an infinite reflection between part and whole. Applied to design, it becomes a material and constructive process rather than a literal mirror. Repetition does not produce identical forms, but deviations, imperfections and transformations. Presented by Alberto Levi Gallery during Salone del Mobile, the exhibition introduces a new rug collection designed by Aptitude Objects alongside curated selection of objects. Rooted in Levi’s expertise in textile craftsmanship, each piece is produced in two material interpretations — wool+cashmere, or abacá fibre — revealing how matter transforms perception while preserving form. The image remains constant; its presence evolves, generating radically different spatial and tactile realities. From this textile foundation, the Objects emerge as volumetric extensions of the same system following the same generative logic. Built through layering and manual aggregation, they reveal the trace of the hand within structured volumes. Mise en abyme thus becomes a material condition. Each object is both autonomous presence and fragment of a larger whole. Space contains the object, and the object contains space. The collection marks the first chapter of an open system, designed to evolve through future transformations.