DesignerItalianb.1939–d.2024
Gaetano Pesce
5 active items
Born in La Spezia in 1939, Gaetano Pesce grew up in Padua and Florence after his father, a naval officer, died during World War II. He enrolled at the University of Venice in 1959, studying architecture under Carlo Scarpa and Ernesto Nathan Rogers, and graduated in 1965. While still a student, between 1958 and 1963, he participated in Gruppo N, a Padua-based collective engaged with programmed and kinetic art - an early sign of his interest in art, politics, and process as intertwined rather than separate concerns.
Pesce came to international attention in 1969 with the Up series designed for C&B Italia (later B&B Italia). The series, particularly the UP5 La Mamma armchair, was produced in vacuum-packed polyurethane foam: a disc the thickness of a book that, released from its packaging, slowly expanded into a voluminous seat. The formal reference was to ancient fertility figures; the intended reading was political, framing the chair as a comment on women's domestic confinement. The technological novelty - furniture as compressed object that activates itself - would influence product design for years.
Through the 1970s and 1980s Pesce continued to work at the border of design and social commentary. He produced the Sit Down armchair and the I Feltri series for Cassina, and in 1983 relocated to New York, where he founded Fish Design and Open Sky. New York became a productive base for the next decades. In 1987, he designed the Organic Building in Osaka, a nine-story facade fitted with planting pockets watered by computer-controlled irrigation - an early experiment in what would later be called living architecture. His fabric design People, also from 1987, incorporated 570 different human figures as a meditation on diversity.
Pesce's commitment to irregularity as a design value crystallized in the Nobody's Perfect collection (2001-2003), made with the publisher Zerodisegno. The series - chairs, armchairs, bookcases - was cast by hand in resin without controlled color mixing or standardized dimensions. Each piece is unique, and each comes with a certificate signed by the worker who produced it. The premise was explicit: variation and imperfection are not failures of manufacturing but expressions of human individuality within industrial processes.
His work is held in more than 30 museum collections worldwide, including MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1996 the Pompidou staged a major solo exhibition, 'Gaetano Pesce, le temps des questions'. The Up series received the Compasso d'Oro ADI Career Award in 2022. Pesce died on 3 April 2024 in New York, aged 84.
On the auction market, Pesce's work spans design and fine art categories. The 16 works in the Auctionist database have appeared at Quittenbaum Kunstauktionen (10 lots), Pandolfini, Bukowskis, Aguttes, and Lyon & Turnbull. Top recorded results include a Sansone II table at 9,000 EUR and two Nobody's Perfect chairs at 5,000 EUR and 4,000 EUR respectively. Five lots remain active, reflecting continued collector interest following his death.