Maurizio Galimberti - illy Art Collection

The Designer

This illy Art Collection was born from the collaboration with the photographer and instant artist Maurizio Galimberti and is a condensation of all the themes and obsessions dear to his poetics. Galimberti’s work has always focused on Polaroid, a means that creates authentic images which record the imperfections of reality, inviting the viewer in to its own dimension. His inspiration is also born from his engagement with a broad cultural framework: the dynamism of Futurism - in particular the work of Umberto Boccioni and Marcel Duchamp. Music too, with its peculiar capacity to dilate time, is the main inspiration of the innovative photo-mosaic technique, used to depict his renowned portraits and landscapes.

The subjects of this collection – Trieste, Venice, Rome, Pisa, Florence and Milan – are tied to this fundamental inspiration and express an intimate passion for the cities and their architecture. This is the personal account of wandering through urban landscapes.

The collection celebrates the daily ritual of coffee, an authentic emblem of Italy just as the cities that animate these cups.


Illy Art Collection

A passion for beauty and well-made objects, a deep admiration for contemporary art , and our blend’s exceptional quality all led us to combine coffee’s sensory pleasure with the aesthetic pleasure of art by rethinking an everyday object: the coffee cup.

This is how the illy Art Collections are born: small works of art in the form of a cup, numbered and signed, transforming the act of drinking an espresso into an experience that involves the senses and mind.