The eye of the beholder
gallerist Nina Yashar in the living room of her Milan home; 1940s 1034 by Gino Sarfatti; by Gio Ponti for Parco dei Principi hotel, Sorrento, Italy.
Anyone who tries to pot the look and lifestyle of Nina Yashar into neat container will discover there is none. The term ‘dealer’ doesn’t come close to describing her Milan-based business of selling and showing at the risky end of beautiful objects, ones not yet blipping on collectors’ radars. And her style is too clever a collage of esteemed but odd elements to be considered ‘eclectic’ — a genre homogenised into stereotype.
No, a whole new taxonomy is needed for the madonna of Milan design; one that nails her auteur ability to order pieces with an impressive provenance into suggestive settings, and her want to wear clothing that is so counter to prevailing trend it creates one.
In the specific matter of her dress — typically pitting femininity against feminism and futurism against historicism in a froth of beads, fur, tulle, turban, precious gem, platform shoe and pyjama set — Yashar mirrors the liberal intellectualism of her fashion bestie, Miuccia Prada. Both women trade on high cerebral values, radical variations from the norm, and Via della Spiga — Milan’s golden fashion thoroughfare, where for more than a decade Yashar has held court at Nilufar.
Named after the Farsi word for lotus, a symbol of her birthplace Iran, this three-level gallery (for want of more protean label) ratifies Newton’s Law of opposites attracting across rooms implied by the space of precious rugs (the sole focus of both her father’s trade and her former business life).
Within these small “scenographies”, as Yashar typifies her art direction, the story implies in the adjacencies of pattern, shape, art, period, light, shadow, colour, texture and tchotchkes. The build of their tension is masterful and also tells across the tiles of Instagram where one assemblage, featuring a flat-weave Navajo rug pinned under by the mid-century bulk of seating by American designers Edward J Wormley and Phillip Lloyd Powell, simmers with subtext on Native American rights. Or, maybe it’s a homage to Hitchcock’s cinematic framing of the male protagonist’s point of view, circa 1950s; one upset by the addition of Giacomo Ravagli’s 2011 Barometro Lamp — an enlightened incongruity of copper and rare marble that remixes the controlling orders of the Golden Age. Yashar simply insinuates and lets her clients insert the story.
Where the Nilufar gallery is her theatre of design, Nilufar Depot, in Milan’s industrial Derganino district, is Yashar’s rock arena. Launching in 2015, and enlarging the gallerist’s exhibition space by 1500 square metres, it is the younger sibling that switches Nilufar’s signature scenographies up to full cinemascope. Here the masters — Gio Ponti, Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Lina Bo Bardi et al — and such aspirants as Martino Gamper, whose 100 Chairs made it to museum plinths courtesy of Yashar’s patronage — have room to express. Their pairings flush out unmade connections and crank up the volume on the beauty of diversity, which leads to the question of whether Yashar needs to dampen the aesthetic noise at home.
Letting Vogue Living in for a privileged peep of the collectables that she has decided to keep close and the conceptualism that turned a mundane white-walled apartment into a mini Mogul palace, the gallerist shares the story of her most enduring scenography yet.
She casts back 32 years to a home search on the outskirts of Milan’s artsy Brera district where, accompanied by her mother, Yashar financially committed to the first place inspected. “I said to my mother, I do not want to see any more homes,” she says with a laugh. “She was shocked. I fell in love with the outdoor spaces; this home has four terraces.” While the pursuit of uncommon reward ››