Gaetano Pesce

Gaetano Pesce(8 November 1939 – 3 April 2024) was an Italian architect and a design pioneer of the 20th century.Pesce was born inLa Speziain 1939, and he grew up inPaduaandFlorence.During his 50-year career, Pesce worked as an architect, urban planner, and industrial designer.His outlook is considered broad and humanistic, and his work is characterized by an inventive use of color and materials, asserting connections between the individual and society, through art, architecture, and design to reappraise mid-twentieth-century modern life.
Pesce, born on 8 November 1939 inLa Spezia, Italy,studied architecture at theUniversity of Venice, with such notable teachers asCarlo ScarpaandErnesto Rogers. Between 1958 and 1963, Pesce participated in Gruppo N, an early collective concerned with programmed art patterned after theBauhaus. Since the 1960s, Gaetano Pesce has been known to relate art to the design of interiors, products, and architecture.The New York TimescriticHerbert Muschampdescribed Pesce as"the architectural equivalent of a brainstorm."Pesce's well known work includesOrganic BuildinginOsaka, Japan, a Landmark vertical garden building designed to concealing a complex, computer-controlled hydration system to sustain plant growth, and the interior architecture of the Chiat/Day offices, an early workplacevillagemodeled after urban life.Among Pesce's architecture achievements areLes HallesACIH (1979) andParc de la Villette(1985), Paris, France, a complex of forms shaped like a running child.
Pesce's prototypical three-dimensional models and architectural drawings are held in the permanent museum collections ofMoMA,Metropolitan Museum of Art, and theCooper-HewittSmithsonian Design Museum in New York City; thePhiladelphia Museum of Art, PA;San Francisco Museum of Art,California;Victoria and Albert Museum, London;Vitra Design Museum, Germany;Danish Museum of Art & Design,Copenhagen;Centre PompidouandMusée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France, and theTriennaleMuseum,Milan, Italy.
From the 1960s on, Pesce researched thefunction and formof utilitarian and decorative objects, including furniture, jewellery, and shoes, from the perspective of human emotion, environment, and production. Pesce is known for innovative high-minded modern design with wit and style.Pesce challenged accepted standards of abstraction, uniformity, and homogeneity. On the architect-designer, critic Susan Slesin wrote, "For Gaetano Pesce, to be modern is to face the world squarely and use design as a means to comment on it.Pesce expanded the established notions ofModernismthrough the creation functional, imperfect, and warmproduct design.He connected art and society to design through organic form, for production byB&B Italia(formerly C & B Italia),Vitra,Cassina, and fabric design, such asPeople(1987), composed of 570 different figures, all of which incorporate ideas about variation and diversity in contemporary society.
Pesce's iconicfeministarmchair- a fulsome bulbous form and attached ball-shapedottoman– alternately referred to as La Mamma, Big Mama, Donna, and Up chair – continues to inspire interpretation nearly 50 years after its creation.According to curator and author of SuperDesign,Maria Cristina Didero, "Pesce wanted to produce something about the condition of women in the world. The chair can be read as the mother, and the stool her child. But it could also be a ball and chain [suggesting] woman and the prison she was obliged to live in."
Pesce is perhaps best known for his work withresin, moulds, and casting techniques used to create objects, including vases, chairs, lamps and the two-dimensional reliefs that the designer called “industrial skins.”From 1987 onwards, he infused ordinary materials with experimental additives, such as liquid plant resin, and worked with foam and urethane, simplify the manufacturing processes and adapt limited industrial capabilities.Pesce credited the early influence of his student work with three venerableMurano glassmakers— Moretti, Vistosi, andVenini— whose casting techniques for informing his label-defying works of sculpture, furniture, vessels, and paintings.Even Pesce's own experimentation in glassmaking led to inventive techniques and highly original results.Pesce even used urethane resin to create necklaces, bracelets, brooches, and rings.
For Pesce, the design and development of portable goods always incorporated craft-specialization, history, humour, and the human need for connection. Pesce'sindustrial designtechniques such asdiversified series productionis a process by which he experimented with materials using a craft manufacturing sensibility applied to mass production methodology.On the production line, for example, factory workers vary proportions to produce a series of objects with an "imperfect and warm" quality.
Socio-political messaging is found in Pesce's collections, such as "Nobody’s Perfect" (2002) by Zerodisegno, and the 2010 series of irregularly shaped tables forCassina, which together form the recognizable shape of a boot shape, commemorating the 150thanniversary of the unification of Italy,and celebrate human diversity and connection,as well as one-of-a-kind pieces like “America Table” (2012), with a red-white-and-blue resin tabletopAmerican flagsupported on letters that spell “independence,” and “Verbal Abuse” (1994), a tall, grided lamp that bends forward with attachable weights.
Pesce's unconventionalmixed-mediaindustrial design and organic forms collected in major museums across the world ascribe the work to the realm of art. A 2014 retrospective exhibitionThe Time of Diversityat theMAXXI, National Museum of the 21st Century Arts,Rome, charted the artfulness of Pesce's product design from the 1960s to the present.Recent exhibitions such as “What it is to be Human,” at The Peninsula Chicago,Art Baselin Hong Kong, and an artist-in-resident program at Peninsula Beijing, all featuring works by Pesce that expand the renown artist and architect's history of public commitment to the arts.In 2016, Pesce unveiled a site-specific sculpture "Majesty Betrayed" on thePiazza Santa Maria Novella. The monumental female figure wrapped in a long cloak by Pesce was inspired by the ChristianMaestàiconography of theMadonna on the Throne– the highly venerated Madonna Rucellai byDuccio di Boninsegna(1285), inSanta Maria Novellaand later moved in the twentieth century to theUffizi.Pesce's sculpture entitled "Porta Ritratti" (2018) for the Milan Fuorisalone was exhibited at the entrance of theBrera Academyof Fine Arts, and later, the 13th edition of Design Miami / Basel. The ambitious installation – a chair measuring over 13 feet (4 meters) high representing 20 human faces – according to Pesce, " is a Trojan horse that penetrates the Rocca dell'Arte making victims among the old mentality."  The work is another compelling tribute to cultural diversity within society.
Pesce's architecture and design have been published, exhibited, and collected internationally and included in the permanent collections of museums around the world.
For 28 years, Pesce taught architectural design at theInstitut National des Sciences Appliquées(INSA) (National Institute of Applied Sciences),Strasbourg, France;Domus Academy,Milan, Italy;City University of Hong Kong, China;Escola da Cidade, (AEAUSP), (Architectural School of São Paulo), Brazil;Carnegie Mellon,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania;Ohio State University,Columbus, Ohio; and inNew York, from 1980 on, at theCooper Union.
Gaetano Pesce died on 3 April 2024, at the age of 84.