Italian Sculptor & Architect Umberto Bellardi Ricci Debuts in New York City.

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“The fold not only transforms the structure of the material but also transforms the relationship of the material and its environment,” says Italian sculptor and architect Umberto Bellardi Ricci, whose Dawn collection of experiential lighting and furniture is currently on show in New York City.

Informed by the designer’s accomplished architecture practice and his training in the social sciences, each piece sits in direct conversation with the environment it lives in, illuminating subtle and evocative relationships between space, light, and material.

Bellardi Ricci’s simple, monumental forms pair elevated materials with the readymade or mundane. This gentle friction—of bronze and travertine in a coffee table, Dedar bouclé and I-beams in a sofa, and the warmth of light refracted by strategically-folded aluminium in a series of modular lighting fixtures—charges his work with a spacious complexity.

His current practice, initiated since relocating to New York in 2018 after years spent teaching architecture in London and working on experimental projects in Mexico, focuses on folding sheet metals (steel and brass), an inherently playful method of wrapping around a voluminous void, exposing the dynamics between interior and exterior space.

“What I find so interesting about the folding process is that the material shifts from something flat with no discernable three-dimensionality, into something that starts to have spatial qualities,” explains Bellardi Ricci. “It begins to show its interior and exterior, and then you can start to reveal and to hide and to play or adjust those elements.”

Dawn is on view at Matter (405 Broome Street, New York) until July 30th. For more information, visit ubrstudio.com and mattermatters.com.

Related: Egg Collective’s Latest Exhibition Highlights the Work of Female Designers who are Mothers.

[Images courtesy of Matter. Photography by Martien Mulder.]