The Museum of Plastic Art: A Synthesis of Art, Design and Plastic

The Museum of Plastic Art A Synthesis of Art Design and Plastic
The Museum of Plastic Art in the Varese area offers an interesting exploration of plastic and its many possible functions.

Italy has recently been given a location that brings together new plastic materials used in everyday life and creative art.

The star of this ambitious project is the town of Castiglione Olona in the province of Varese, which founded MAP - Museo d'Arte Plastica, its home being the recently renovated 15th Century Palazzo dei Castiglioni di Monteruzzo.

MAP is one of Italy's first examples of an innovative museum offering a display of industrial materials destined for various uses by society, such as plastic and its derivatives (including acetate, polystyrene, vinyl and polymers) which have been transformed into authentic works of art thanks to a group of artists' creativity and experimental research.

The project comes to us from the early 1970s, when Polimero Arte - a famous plastics production laboratory of the company Mazzuchellli 1849 SpA - offered a group of young Italian and international artists an authentic atelier and placed at their disposal the experience of the company's technical experts in working with plastic materials in exchange for a work of art to be left at the center.

This meeting of artists and workers, but also of company and culture, led to the creation of numerous