Repertorio: Nina Yashar Finally Staged a Show Inside the Theatre Her Warehouse Was Always Built to Be

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 6 min

Nilufar Depot’s Repertorio ran from 8 April to 31 May 2025 as a five-act exhibition across two of the gallery’s Milan sites. The theatrical structure was not a curatorial flourish invented for the occasion. Nina Yashar’s warehouse was designed a decade earlier by an architect who modelled it directly on Teatro alla Scala. Repertorio was the building finally being used exactly as built.

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Repertorio, Nilufar’s flagship exhibition for Milan Design Week 2025, ran from 8 April to 31 May 2025 across Nilufar Depot on Viale Lancetti and Nilufar’s original galleries on Via della Spiga and Via Senato. Curated by gallery founder Nina Yashar, it was structured in five acts, moving between contemporary makers working in brass, resin and twisted branch, and historic figures including the American woodworker George Nakashima. The framing, five acts rather than five rooms or five sections, was deliberate, and it points to something about the Depot building that most coverage of the show did not mention: the space was designed, in 2015, specifically to function as a theatre.

By the time this piece is published, Repertorio has been closed for well over a year, and the specific pieces shown have long since moved on. What has not moved on is the building itself, and it is the building, rather than any single object inside it, that best explains why Nilufar’s exhibitions read the way they do.

A building built to be a theatre, a decade before it was used as one

Nilufar Depot occupies a 1,500 square metre former warehouse on Viale Lancetti in Milan’s Isola district, a former industrial quarter that has become one of the city’s more concentrated design and gallery districts over the past two decades. Its conversion, completed in 2015 under the architect Massimiliano Locatelli of CLS Architetti, was explicitly modelled on Teatro alla Scala, Milan’s opera house, rather than on a conventional gallery or showroom. The result is a central atrium ringed by box-like rooms, with spaces divided by what Locatelli’s own team described as wings and curtains rather than walls and doorways, echoing the layout of an opera house’s stalls and private boxes. A six-metre brass curtain sculpture by the artist Leonor Antunes hangs as the space’s centrepiece, a permanent theatrical prop inside a building that otherwise still functions as a working storage depot for the gallery’s inventory, pieces awaiting sale or loan stacked and stored between the same walls used to stage exhibitions. The Depot opened to the public across an inaugural event running 14 to 19 April 2015, and it is that dual identity, functioning warehouse and theatrical exhibition space at once, that gives Nilufar’s programming there a different character to a conventional white-cube gallery, where inventory and display are always kept strictly apart.

Ten years later, Repertorio gave that architecture a curatorial premise built to match it. A show organised into five acts, staged inside a building whose rooms were designed as wings and boxes around a central stage, is not a metaphor imposed on the space from outside. It is the building’s own logic, used for the first time as its own exhibition brief rather than as a backdrop for one.

What the five acts actually contained

Across the two sites, Repertorio paired contemporary makers against significant figures from design’s recent past, staging the tension between craftsmanship and art, historical and current practice, that Yashar has said the show was built around.

Vikram Goyal, working from Indian metalwork traditions, showed a group of limited-edition pieces including Mesa consoles built from sculpted brass, continuing his practice of applying centuries-old repoussé and casting techniques associated with Indian temple metalwork to contemporary furniture forms. Objects of Common Interest, the New York and Athens-based studio run by Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis, presented Lucid Dreamscape, a monochromatic installation built almost entirely from red resin, staged as what the studio has called a mise-en-scène rather than a conventional furniture display, treating colour itself as the organising material of the room. At Nilufar’s original Via della Spiga and Via Senato galleries, vintage works by George Nakashima, the American architect and woodworker known for furniture that preserves a tree’s natural edge and grain rather than squaring it off, were shown alongside newer work including sculptural lighting by Maximilian Marchesani built from twisted branches and accented with feathers, a direct material echo of Nakashima’s own respect for wood left close to its unworked state. Further pieces across the show included work by Martino Gamper, Wendy Andreu and Bram Vanderbeke, and mid-century figures Gabriella Crespi and Paul Evans, extending the same past-and-present pairing across a wider roster than any single act could hold on its own.

The effect, moving between acts, was closer to attending a programme with several distinct works on the bill than to walking a single continuous exhibition. That is precisely the point of staging a show inside a room built like a theatre.

The financier who left banking for hammered brass

Vikram Goyal’s presence in Repertorio is worth dwelling on, because his own route into design runs in the opposite direction from most of the makers Nilufar typically shows. He studied engineering and development economics at Princeton, then spent years working in finance in the United States and Hong Kong before returning to India in 2000. His first venture back home was not a design studio at all but Kama Ayurveda, a wellness and beauty brand built around reviving traditional Ayurvedic formulations. The metalwork studio came after that, built around repoussé, a hand-hammering technique that raises a design in relief from the reverse side of a sheet of brass, alongside pietra dura inlay and hollowed joinery construction. Goyal has described the appeal of the material directly: sheet metal, rigid by nature, takes on what he calls a sensuous, visceral quality once it has been worked by hand through processes that depend on knowledge passed between generations of Indian craftspeople rather than on a single designer’s own technical training. His Mesa consoles at Repertorio, and the wider Rajasthan-influenced ornamental language behind them, trace back to childhood surroundings filled with inherited objects and artefacts rather than to a formal design education at all.

A resin workshop built specifically to make this kind of colour possible

Objects of Common Interest, the studio behind Lucid Dreamscape, is run by Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis, working between bases in Greece and New York. Their practice sits deliberately between formal precision and improvisation, and in 2022 they opened a dedicated resin fabrication workshop in Piraeus specifically so they could experiment directly with materials and processes rather than working through outside fabricators at a remove from their own hands. Lucid Dreamscape’s monochromatic red staging at Repertorio is a direct product of that workshop: a still-life environment built from a single saturated colour and a single material family, treated less as a furniture collection than as an experiential installation in its own right, closer in spirit to the studio’s large-scale public commissions than to a conventional showroom display.

Nina Yashar, forty-six years into the gallery she built from a carpet trade

Yashar was born into a family of Persian carpet and textile merchants and relocated to Milan as a child. She began working alongside her father before starting her own business at twenty-one, initially dealing in antique and nineteenth-century French carpets before shifting her focus to vintage design. She founded Nilufar in 1979, and over more than four decades built it into one of the design world’s most closely watched galleries, credited with identifying and championing collectible design talent well ahead of the wider market. She later launched Nilufar Edition, a programme pairing contemporary designers with traditional Italian craft workshops, extending the same historical-and-current pairing that defines her curatorial approach at the gallery level into individual commissioned pieces.

Read against that history, Repertorio was not simply a Milan Design Week showcase. It was a demonstration, staged across five acts inside a building designed to hold exactly this kind of production, of the specific curatorial instinct Yashar has been developing since she was twenty-one years old: that design history and design’s present belong in the same room, examined side by side rather than kept in separate categories.

That instinct also shapes Nilufar Edition, the programme Yashar has run alongside the gallery’s core dealing and exhibition business, which commissions contemporary designers to work directly with traditional Italian craft workshops on new pieces produced in limited runs. Where the gallery’s vintage inventory preserves design history as found, Nilufar Edition manufactures new objects using the same historical craft infrastructure, effectively building fresh material for future editions of a show like Repertorio to draw on. Vikram Goyal and Objects of Common Interest, both working at the edge between craft technique and contemporary design language, sit closer to the Edition’s territory than to the gallery’s vintage holdings, even though Repertorio presented all of it under one roof.

Final thoughts

Repertorio closed on 31 May 2025, and its individual pieces have since dispersed back into Nilufar’s inventory and its makers’ own studios. What stays true regardless is the relationship between the show and the room it happened in. Massimiliano Locatelli built Nilufar Depot as a theatre in 2015 without knowing what would eventually be staged inside it. A decade later, Nina Yashar gave it a script.