Late Designer Gaetano Pesce Honored at Design Miami.Basel
MILAN — The legacy of Italian architect and industrial designer Gaetano Pesce, who died in April at age 84, will be honored at Design Miami.Basel with not one, but two showcases.
With its first showcase at the collectible design and art fair, Paris’ Pulp Galerie will unveil an exhibit of some of Pesce’s more rare pieces that explore his free-spirited vocabulary, non-conformist approach and the use of experimental materials and eccentric shapes, distorting the furniture’s initial purpose.
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Design Miami.Basel will run from Monday to June 16 at the Messe Basel Convention Center in Basel, Switzerland.
An Italian garden scene, designed by interior architect Cyrille Van Dievoet and interior and furniture designer Hugo Travaux, will set the tone for a display that will include non-commercial pieces like the Sick cabinet; the Pratt chair n°7 that was showcased at the 1996 Centre Pompidou exhibition “Le temps des questions”; the first two Greene Street chairs ever produced, as well as the Broadway 931 dining table.
Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939, Pesce studied architecture at the University of Venice and was a participant in Gruppo N, a collective concerned with programmed art patterned after the Bauhaus.
Among his most seminal furniture pieces are the Tramonto, a New York sofa for Cassina in 1980, and the 1969 Up 50 armchair for B&B Italia that he made in the shape of a woman with an affixed ball ottoman, which was a representation of imprisonment.
As a sculptor, he embraced synthetic materials that he argued could trace their origins to nature and the ground. Resin, foam and silicone captured both the type of transparency and color Pesce sought to achieve in his jubilant and sometimes provocative works.
Also at Design Miami.Basel fellow Paris gallery Galerie Gastou will showcase Pesce’s work alongside late Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata, who was regarded as the champion of light and transparency. This showcase will focus on both designers’ use of plastic and how its use in the 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of an uncharted, liberated path, giving rise to new artistic movements.
Before his death, Pesce planned “Nice to See You,” an exhibit of his recent works, that went on without him during Milan Design Week in April at the Ambrosiana Library. His work transcended the worlds of art, design and fashion. In 2022, Pesce designed 400 resin chairs for Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore show for Bottega Veneta, each with a unique resin finish, some with hand-drawings, that were later made available for purchase.
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