La Cova

What can be more surreal in the collective imagination than a human-size nest where one can seek shelter and find rest? This 1972 masterpiece by Gianni Ruffi and edited by Gufram in a limited edition is a veritable work of art: La Cova is a place, a space where one can feel protected; it is the physical as well as the imaginary dimension of absolute relaxation.
The secret to its organic shape is in it being eccentric, that is not perfectly circular; at the same time the hollow – hand hewn from a polyurethane block – is not perfectly symmetrical, so as to create the harmonic irregularity of a veritable nest. The entire structure, light and soft because it is entirely made of polyurethane, is upholstered with cloth on which thousands of felted fabric offcuts are hand sewn in a spiral path. The colours of the cloth follow an ideal pattern so as to always suggest the same nuances, but with slight differences given by the position of the different colours. For all these reasons each La Cova is different from another, and each one of them represents a world.
On exhibit in some of the most important museums of the world, La Cova is part of the permanent collection
of Deste Foundation and Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal.
La Cova has in itself the heritage of the universal thinking of a man like Gianni Ruffi, which finds its appropriate spiritual positioning inside Gufram's collection, a galaxy made of poetry.