More or less 60 chairs in 60 years is not just an exhibition: it is a testament to Vico Magistretti’s declared passion for chairs.
He himself admitted it in a 2003 interview: “I have a somewhat shameful passion
for chairs. I think it's because they’re the hardest thing, they don't forgive you anything. It's hard to be happy with a chair.”

It is a well-known obsession: as early as 1980, following an idea from his friend Enrico Baleri, Vico organised a solo exhibition at Studio Marconi in Milan, Vent’anni, venti sedie (Twenty years, Twenty chairs). The title was simple, effective, and worked just as well in London the following year, when with a slight tweak it became Twenty-one years, twenty- one chairs for the first Designers’ Saturday.

And today, Fondazione studio museo Vico Magistretti takes up the torch with More or less 60 chairs in 60. The exhibition stems from this idea but, above all – as always – from the Studio Magistretti archive. Luca Poncellini, the exhibition’s curator, has practically moved in there: he has read and reread letters, agreement drafts, faxes, and press kits; he studied patent files and photos of prototypes and models; he examined drawings and deciphered notes. Thanks to this meticulous and in-depth research, the design lines of Vico’s work – concept design, redesigning the tradition, and autobiographical inspiration – have come together to narrate an entire career through a single furniture typology: the chair.

The exhibition unfolds along two paths: a timeline of original drawings and photographic reproductions of more than sixty chairs – sixty-six, to be precise, too many for the small studio museum – designed by Magistretti over his sixty-year career. In addition, a dozen or so chairs are available for visitors to sit on and try out, along with just as many notebooks filled with the stories behind each chair: insights, collaborations, revisions, reconsiderations, production challenges, and even some legal troubles.

Thus, More or less 60 chairs in 60 is not just an exhibition; it is an invitation to sit down – literally – and read: each chair tells its own story, and all together they reveal the vision of a designer who left an indelible mark on both Italian and international design history.