Renata Bonfanti Biography
Renata Bonfanti (1929 - 2018) was an Italian artist and designer. Passionate about the art of weaving since she was a child, she attended classical high school and then the State Institute of Art in Venice and then in Oslo (at the beginning of the 1950s). Towards the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s she began to delve into industrial design, a research that led her to design hand-woven tapestries and carpets in which artificial fibers were contrasted with natural ones. Later, her interest in weaving designs led her to favor wool, linen and cotton. Also in 1954 he participated in the Milan Triennale with a knotted woven carpet and opened a weaving workshop in Bassano del Grappa. In 1956 it began producing, in addition to handmade carpets, mechanically processed upholstery curtain fabrics. In the following year, for Bruno Danese's editions, he produced fabrics for lamps and textile objects designed by Bruno Munari. In 1958 he designed the carpets - tapestries of the Algeria series. These products are woven by continuously and freely varying the interweaving of warp and weft, so as to form a sequence of decorative, and not figurative, motifs that alternate across the entire surface of the work. In 1960, with his sister Maria Luisa, he opened a showroom in Milan and began collaborating with many architectural firms, including Giò Ponti, Alessandro Mendini, BBRT (Belgioioso Peressutti and Rogers), Angelo Mangiarotti, Gianfranco Frattini, Comolli and Poli, Salvati and Tresoldi. In 1962 he received the prestigious Compasso d'Oro Award for his production and in particular for the "JL" curtain fabric. In 1970 he inaugurated a new laboratory in Mussolente (VI), expanding production and equipment which included hand looms and mechanical looms. His works can be found in public and private collections: Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago (Chile) – Faculty of Architecture, Lausanne (Switzerland) – Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia (USA) – Municipality of Vicenza, Department of Culture – Casabianca Museum, Malo (Vicenza) – Center Créations Industrielles, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris – Museum of Design, Triennale di Milano, Milan – Staatliches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Munich – Museum Library Archive, Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza).
