Marta Minujín’s textile art in Alcova: a collaboration with El Espartano Editor

As part of Milan Design Week 2025, El Espartano Editor presents together with Marta Minujín the series Intertwined Concepts, a collection of original textile works that transforms the exhibition space into a sensory experience.

The installation, exhibited at Alcova, inside the historic Villa Bagatti Valsecchi (Varedo, Italy), brings together five large-format pieces woven with the hand-tufting technique, made of pure wool and composed of a vibrant palette of eleven fluorescent colors. The works project Minujín’s unmistakable aesthetics onto habitable surfaces that invite play, movement and contemplation.

The proposal has generated a great response from the public, which has been impressed by the visual power of Marta Minujín’s universe and surprised by the use of textiles as an architectural language within the historical environment of the place. The combination of contemporary art and Argentine textile knowledge arouses curiosity, admiration and conversation.

The series takes as its starting point the work of the same name created by the artist between 2019 and 2022: a large-scale soft sculpture that revisits the use of the mattress as an expressive medium, a resource that Minujín has been exploring since the 1960s. This original piece – made with mattress fabric, foam rubber and fluorescent paint – was exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York and is currently part of the show at the Copenhagen Contemporary.

In this collaboration, the disruptive energy of Marta Minujín is intertwined with the more than 80 years of technical and artisanal trajectory of El Espartano. As the Editor, the company translates with precision and sensitivity the artistic vision into a visual and tactile textile reality, respecting every detail of the original creation.

Thanks to its vertical integration -from the spinning mill to the final product-, El Espartano guarantees an exhaustive control of each stage of the process, using Argentine wool of great softness and resistance, from sheep raised in our country. This noble raw material enhances the expressiveness of each piece, and enhances the tactile and enveloping character of the installation.

“When I started, I wanted to express a colorful pop world, a free world, a fun world. The fluorescent mattresses created a restorative dreamscape, as if you were sleeping and dreaming beautiful things, regaining energy to keep going.”

— Marta Minujín (2024)

Each work is an original multiple, signed by the artist and numbered. El Espartano Editor guarantees its authenticity, as well as Marta Minujín’s signature and edition number.