In the history of graphics, the posters designed by Bruno Monguzzi mark an advanced point of research that distinguishes him internationally. They verge on perfection, playing right across the board with lettering, typography and photography. The composition pushes itself into forms of experimentalism that are never banal or superficial. His posters have a sonorous verve, a musical as well as visual composition. His texts use typefaces, but also geometric forms, or unexpected montages of both. Composition generates a rhythm; it is like seeing the letters dancing until they find their correct position. Playing with letters is really a difficult art, it requires perceptual wisdom and daring; it is like walking on a tightrope suspended between very tall buildings, but Monguzzi is a magical acrobat. His posters for culture are the acme of this sector, hence the critical choice was to exhibit some of his masterpieces among those he donated to the m.a.x. museo in Chiasso.
Bruno Monguzzi (1941) hails from Chiasso. From 1956 to 1960 he studied graphic design at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Geneva, then moved to London, where he attended courses in psychology of perception, typography and photography at St. Martin’s School of Art, Central School of Art and Design and the London College of Printing.
In 1961 he began his career at Studio Boggeri in Milan, an extraordinary forge of visual communication through which Xanti Schawinsky and Max Huber had already passed. From 1963 he taught typographic design in Venice for two years and in 1965 he was invited by Studio Gagnon/Valkus to design nine pavilions for the ’67 Universal Exhibition in Montreal. He returned to Milan in 1968, collaborated with Roberto Sambonet and again with Antonio Boggeri until the studio closed in the early eighties. In 1971 Monguzzi returned to Ticino, settling at Meride. In Lugano he taught at the Centro Scolastico per le Industrie Artistiche (CSIA), then, in the nineties, in the first three years of the SUPSI and the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio. He also taught in many parts of the world, such as the United States, China and Japan.
From 1987 to 2004 he curated the image of the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano, from 2001 to 2009 that of the Culture Office in Chiasso, and from 2009 to 2014 the identity of the refounded Teatro San Materno in Ascona.
In 1983 he won the competition for the image and signage of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and for this work he received the Prix Janus from the French government. In 1994 he was voted the leading Swiss typographer. Among numerous international awards, Monguzzi likes to remember the first, completely unexpected, the Bodoni Prize (1971) and, in 2000, the Yusaku Kamekura Award, presented for the first time to a non-Japanese graphic designer. Then, in 2003, he was appointed Honorary Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of London, the elite of world design; other Swiss who have received the same award: Jan Tschichold, Herbert Matter, Walter Herdeg, Armin Hofman, Josef Müller-Brockmann and Karl Gerstner.
Monographs on his work have been published in Italy, Switzerland, the United States, Iran, China and Japan. After the great anthological shows at Villeurbanne (1992), Baltimore (1998), Tokyo (2000), Winterthur (2001), Chaumont (2006), Cieszin (2008), in 2011 the m.a.x. museo celebrated the “fifty years of paper” of this boy from Chiasso, with an exhibition that immediately afterwards travelled to the Vignelli Center for Design Studies in Rochester and to China, first in Hangzhou and then, in 2014, in Shenzhen in conjunction with a new publication of the same name edited published by Jianping He. In 2016 the Erich Lindenberg Art Foundation in Porza produced Bruno Monguzzi. La mosca e la ragnatela (86’) by Heinz Bütler, a fundamental complement to the exhibition and book of the same name.
Works by the author in institutional collections: Maison du Livre e de l’Affiche, Chaumont; National Museum, Poznam; Hofmitz Milken Center for Typography, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA; Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich; Swiss National Museum, Zurich; Centro Internazionale d’Arte e Grafica CIAG, Chiasso
