Bicycle and Motorbike between Graphics and Design
Stefano Pivato
Giorgio Sarti
Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini
SilvanaEditoriale, 2025
Italiano-inglese
24 x 24 cm, pp. 272
ISBN 9788836661060
CHF 38.- / Euro 38
The exhibition held at the m.a.x. museo, Bicycle and Motorbike between Graphics and Design, and this catalogue present a coherent reflection on the social and cultural values of two-wheelers as a means of transport, interpreted through the history of graphics and design. As a whole, the exhibition seeks to recount how graphics and design have been closely entwined in the various historical-artistic periods until contemporary times.
Through over a hundred plates in full colour, all the materials exhibited in the rooms of the museum are published here. They include the wonderful chromolithographic posters designed by masters of graphics, from Leopoldo Metlicovitz to Marcello Dudovich, Aleardo Villa, Plinio Codognato, Achille Luciano Mauzan, Gino Boccasile, Erberto Carboni and Armando Testa. These are followed by the posters, advertising graphics, sketches, leaflets, postcards, brochures, and a wide variety of designer objects related to bicycles and motorcycles. Alongside the graphic output is the other distinctive feature of the exhibition: design, namely the original models of vintage bicycles and motorcycles, some twenty of them in all (from the beginnings with the velocipede to the bicycle and all the way to the transition from the motorised bicycle to the motorcycle), with examples of the brands that have been landmarks in the evolution of two-wheelers, motorised and non-motorised, including rare specimens produced in Switzerland.
A particular feature is the work of the motorcycle designer Rodolfo Frascoli in the “forest of posters” published at the end of the plates in the catalogue. Accompanying the discovery and study in depth of this theme are essays by Stefano Pivato, Guido Andrea Pautasso, Giorgio Sarti, Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini, Maria Canella and Claudio Visentin. The result is an overview that brings out how, through the decades, the bicycle and motorcycle have dictated stylistic trends and contributed to building many of our modern myths.
