Early 1950s.
The lot is accompanied by the certificate of authenticity from the Zavanella archive.
The armchair in question represents an interesting evolution of Renzo Zavanella's furniture design.
The Mantuan architect used to design "unique pieces" ad hoc for individual residences, objects that were not industrially produced in series, thus remaining faithful to that artisan dimension of the profession and to that desire to experiment, from time to time, shapes, materials and new techniques.
Within this rich and multifaceted production, however, some common traits can be noted in Zavannelli's furniture design: a formal plastic research tending towards expressionism often brought to the extreme consequences of organic and "natural" forms, so much so that the same Gio Ponti, with regard to the furnishings of the Hotel Lido Mediterraneo in Sanremo, wondered, in an article published in Domus, if the furnishings designed by Zavanella had been molded with the plastic materials that new technologies then began to make available to the most innovative and attentive to the evolution of production techniques. The armchair proposed here refers to some interior studies that the Mantuan architect carried out between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s for shops and interiors of the Milanese upper class for which he worked intensely at that time. The armchair also has the characteristic high back with the "big ears" that directly recall the seats of the railway carriages designed for the "OM" and the wooden feet of very low height and organically curved, also elements that can be found in general in the architect's seating design.