The Owl Wardrobe (1968) cm 160x420x50 – Tempera su carta applicata su legno

The Owl Wardrobe is a wedding gift, as well as the largest piece of furniture designed and decorated by Dady Orsi. Inspired by the Renaissance sacristy closets, it is tailored to the spaces of the new house where the artist moved after his marriage to his second wife Megy Bassi in 1968. It has eight compartments of which, symbolically, seven reveal their contents while one appears closed by a door. Originally conceived for the bedroom, it is decorated with trompe l’oeil and collage paintings, whose symbols are linked to time (musical instruments, clocks, candlesticks), to the night (the owl, the moon) and to Eros, which appears through the image of Marilyn Monroe. This iconography makes the work the most impressive still-life ever painted by the artist. Due to unforeseen events that arose during the work on the house, the closet changed its use, becoming the backdrop for the dining room. Family and business dinners are held in front of the Owl Cupboard: it is during one of these dinners that Piero Fornasetti, captured by the detail of the owl, an animal that for him was a symbol of wisdom and farsightedness, with his usual irony coined the name. It was also against the backdrop of the Owl’s Closet that Jean Blanchaert and Miro Silvera designed the 1995 exhibition, whose still-lifes share the sense of suspended life that is also present in the decorations of this closet.