And to celebrate, Gufram is releasing the Bocca in 25 new tones
By Madeleine Luckel via Archictectural Digest
Even if you can’t name it, you’ve no doubt seen it—in photographs of modern yet daring homes, film stills, and yes, museum galleries. But the illustrious Bocca, or Lips, sofa, which is produced by Italian company Gufram, seems to have a rich future on its horizon. This year, the design turns 50, and to celebrate, the brand has released 25 new colorways. Below, Gufram’s art director Charley Vezza tells AD PRO all about the product’s past and present, as well as why exactly it looms so large in his childhood memories.
Charley Vezza: The story of the Bocca sofa is very peculiar: Studio 65 designed it in 1970 for a beauty center in Milan. Thinking about it, it is quite funny that such an iconic design was not made to be a best-selling piece, but rather as part of a bespoke contract project. Times were very different—the product was made with a mold, and making a mold for a one-of-a-kind design is not economical. But Gufram was, and still is, a laboratory which worked on handmade and crafted pieces, and they accepted the challenge. With time the brand understood its potential and added the Bocca to its catalogue.
CV: It is true that the first artist to come up with the idea of transforming lips into a seating system was Salvador Dalí, but the actual origin of the Bocca is very different. It was a sofa created for an interiors project, and its inspiration was more about the absolute abstraction of beauty [as opposed to] an homage to or a reinterpretation of Surrealism. On the other hand, [the Italian] Radical Design [period] has surrealist undertones. Radical Design pieces are not just examples of furniture, they are domestic sculptures which can transform a room into a surrealist space. Read more from Architectural Digest.
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