Item made for the ‘Grande vendita: 12 giorni, 200 articoli’ (Big Sale: 12 Days, 200 Items)
exhibition, which opened on 19 December 1964 at Galleria La Salita in Rome. The exhibition poster was a tongue-in-cheek advertisement for a department store’s sale. The La Standa supermarket was responsible for the fittings, while the ‘items’ on sale were Cosmetici and toiletries by Giosetta Fioroni, Fermacarte (in polyester, by Gianfranco Baruchello), Dischi (with a magnet and metal filings for lunar images, by Davide Boriani), Buste (with a surprise, by Giulio Paolini) and many other items, complete with a price list. Among them, at 14,000 lira, Mauri’s Abat-jour in linen batiste, which he had decorated, was the most expensive item. The decorations are decals, images from newspapers and magazines that Mauri transferred onto the lamp using a solvent. This was, perhaps, his very first work using projection or, as Laura Cherubini called it, a ‘miniature cinematograph’.1 Mauri made two examples of Abat-jour that differed in model and size (inv. 3, 94).

1. Fabio Mauri 1968–1978, catalogue of the exhibition (Fondazione Malvina Menegaz, Castelbasso), edited by Laura Cherubini, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo, 2018, p. 15.