Unbound: A Salvino Marsura retrospective

This year's London Design Festival sees Béton Brut present ‘Unbound’, the first major retrospective of iron-artist Salvino Marsura (1938-2020). ‘Unbound’ explores ideas of nature uninhibited and the human impulse to restrain it. Organic metal forms — roots, tendrils, stalactites — vie against shackles and chainlink in this curated Marsuran underworld. Spanning six decades of Marsura’s furniture, lighting and sculpture, the show brings unseen works from his Treviso forge into Béton Brut’s interior landscape, celebrating the gallery’s 10th anniversary in Hackney Wick. All that is wild and unruly, wrangled and hammered, is set against a deliberately spare curation of vintage from the Béton Brut collection. Rationalist club seating by early minimalist Jean Michel Frank exercises restraint and gives Marsura’s works room for contemplation. This complementary display reveals how his works were not only conceived as expressive forms, but as functional pieces to be lived with and used. Now in its twelfth year, with its space turning 10, Béton Brut has grown from a single sofa into a gallery with global reach. Founder Sophie Pearce has in that time assembled a collection with a distinct visual language — a pared-back palette with a honed sensitivity to material and form. Salvino Marsura (1938–2020), a singular figure in 20th-century Italian design, trained under sculptor and ‘iron poet’ Toni Benetton and spent over six decades in his Treviso workshop producing non-conformist sculpture, furniture and objects. A solitary man in flow, Marsura’s use of iron was perhaps a way to organise the intensity of his thought, a mind persistently questioning the strangeness of nature and the human condition. In a pamphlet written by the artist, Marsura alludes to William Blake’s idea of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ — the constraints of society and the limits of our imagination. “I am searching for a new world,” he said, “because you are losing the old one.” Béton Brut previously announced its representation of the Marsura Estate in Milan in April 2025, with monumental works exhibited at Alcova’s Villa Borsani and smaller sculptures displayed in Tutto Bene Studio’s Milan pied-à-terre. A collection of never-seen ironwork mirrors was also recently shown in ‘Forge to Fold’, a Béton Brut group show for London Craft Week in May. Béton Brut Founder/Director Sophie Pearce says: “It is a privilege to bring Salvino’s distinctive hand to a wider audience. Marsura’s works belie a tension, between control and intuition, structure and release — a duality I relate to. Béton Brut was founded on instinct — works are sourced by heart and ‘eye’... with Marsura you have that feeling. But I also wanted to bring coherence and story to the miscellany of vintage, every curation a reflection of my interior world.”