Armando Testa was perhaps the most influential and best-known Italian advertising figure of the last century. Using irony and powerful communication, he built a universe of images that have entered the collective imagination.
This book conveys this great artist’s vision and graphic universe. Testa approached the work of creation with humour and a radical creative anarchy that freely appropriated stylistic features, signs and iconographic references before reassembling them in a deliberate departure from any historical systematic approach. He passed from John Cage to De Chirico, Duchamp and Malevic with the inventive seen only in great communicators and true creatives.
His campaigns and images have become icons of our times and this book illustrates the richness and profundity of his development process.
It is published in conjunction with an exhibition at Mart in 2017, curated by Gianfranco Maraniello with Gemma De Angelis Testa.