mario ceroli crafts a pine-carved 'domestic theater' in milan

teatro domestico: Mario Ceroli’s furnishings display in milan

At the Milanese gallery Carrozzeria900, the exhibition Teatro Domestico (Domestic Theater) displays a rare reconstruction of Mario Ceroli’s wooden furnishings from a single country house. The installation restores the intimate unity of a domestic space envisioned by one of Italy’s most distinctive sculptors and designers.

Entering the space, visitors encounter a complete environment of Ceroli’s pieces, drawn from the Mobili nella Valle series designed in the 1970s for Poltronova. The Russian pine furniture is warm and marked by visible grain, and each table and chair carries traces of manual workmanship that resist uniformity.

images © Carrozzeria900

italian design heritage shows at milanese gallery Carrozzeria900

For his Carrozzeria900 exhibition, Mario Ceroli’s approach belongs to an Italian lineage where sculpture extends into everyday life. In Teatro Domestico, form and function remain inseparable: the carved silhouettes of a bed or chair are at once structural and expressive. These are furnishings designed for living yet conceived with the sensibility of a set designer.

The choice of material is central. Pine, a modest wood, clearly holds the Italian designer‘s cuts and profiles with tactility. The grain’s direction guides the eye, suggesting movement across otherwise static planes. Within this controlled geometry, light becomes a collaborator — absorbed, refracted, and softened by the natural tone of the surfaces. This way, the room feels at once curated and discovered.

Teatro Domestico gathers Mario Ceroli’s pine furnishings with Carrozzeria900’s Milan gallery

decades preserved before new reassembly

The objects in Teatro Domestico share a single provenance: they were once part of a private interior, preserved for decades before being reunited in the gallery. Their reassembly transforms personal memory into architectural narrative. The installation conveys a sense of continuity between the home they once furnished and the exhibition that now houses them, aligning Ceroli’s practice with the broader history of Italian design as an art of spatial storytelling.

Mario Ceroli’s work has long moved between sculpture and scenography, between the singular gesture and the inhabited environment. His furniture captures this duality. Functional forms become carriers of emotion through proportion and material intelligence rather than ornament. In Teatro Domestico, the boundary between art and craft dissolves into a grounded and human design language.

each piece reveals Mario Ceroli’s sculptural approach to everyday forms