Editor's Note
This editor’s note highlights the key facts and market implications behind “Francesco Simeti – This Room No Longer Has Walls”, with emphasis on sourcing, product fit, fabrication, logistics, or buyer impact.
Invited by the Foundation to create a permanent installation within the bar space, Francesco Simeti has produced an open work that brings the history of ceramics and the natural world into dialogue with the architecture of the new headquarters.
In continuity with a research practice that investigates and questions the relationship between humans and the natural and artificial environments they inhabit, the work "This Room No Longer Has Walls" defines an imaginary suspended between the fantastic and the real, taking shape through the combination of figurative elements drawn from material culture. Over several months of research and conceptualization of the work, Simeti engaged in an iconographic study of the history of ceramic decoration across cultures and centuries of production. Freely selecting certain decorative elements from ceramic artifacts in public and private collections, the outcomes of this research were reworked into the landscape that envelops the environment through composite vegetation, inhabited by terrestrial and marine animals, and in dialogue with the greenery of the external courtyard.
Entirely clad with large ceramic slabs, the surfaces of "This Room No Longer Has Walls" reproduce out of scale the detail—along with the marks of time and imperfections—of decorations that testify to an uninterrupted and still vital flow of exchange between images and cultural meanings.
The choice to intervene in a Foundation environment destined to be a place of meeting, study, and dialogue is linked to the "open" nature of Simeti's work, conceived from its earliest design phases to be enriched and integrated over time with three-dimensional elements created as part of ceramic workshops and educational activities curated by the artist himself together with the working group of Officine Saffi.
Francesco Simeti's work was realized with the contribution of Iris Ceramica Group and the use of custom ceramic slabs printed using Iris Ceramica Group's "Design Your Slabs" technology. At the center of the bar, the counter is entirely clad with red-body ceramic from "Bottega d'Arte," a project that highlights the heritage of the Iris Ceramica brand, part of Iris Ceramica Group.
Francesco Simeti was born in Palermo in 1968 and lives and works in New York. Simeti is known for his site-specific installations where aesthetics and compositional principles reveal complex meanings upon closer observation. In his work, the artist often uses photographic documents taken from newspapers and magazines to raise questions about the role of images in contemporary discourse. Public art is a fundamental aspect of his practice; he has collaborated with Percent for Art and Public Art for Public Schools in New York, Multnomah County in Oregon, and has created permanent installations at subway stations in Brooklyn and Chicago. Simeti has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues such as Assembly Room in New York (2019); Open Source Gallery in New York (2017); Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Palermo (2012); and Artists Space in New York (2009). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Museo Civico di Castelbuono in Palermo (2019); ICA Singapore (2017); Palazzo Reale in Milan (2016); and Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Turin (2014). The artist's works have also been presented at the Milan Triennale (2014 and 2013). Francesco Simeti lives and works in New York and collaborates with Francesca Minini gallery.
Fondazione Officine Saffi wishes to thank the artist; Iris Ceramica Group for its fundamental contribution; and Wannenes Art Auctions for the kind provision of the numerous iconographic materials useful for the realization of the work. Special thanks to architect Donatella Melchiori, Maria Adelaide Marchesoni, and Francesca Minini gallery. Additional thanks to Riccardo Rossi for his consultancy on the bar space interiors.
Source: Read the original article | Published: April 11, 2026