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Designer Gaetano Pesce has died in New York at the age of 84.
“It is with a heavy heart we announce the passing of visionary creator Gaetano Pesce,” read a post on his Instagram page Thursday morning. “Over the course of six decades Gaetano revolutionized the worlds of art, design, architecture and the liminal spaces between these categories. His originality and nerve are matched by none. Despite dealing with health related set backs, especially in the last year, Gaetano remained positive, playful and ever curious. He is survived by his children, family, and all who adored him. His uniqueness, creativity and special message live on through his art.”
In 1962, Pesce made design history with the debut of his UP series for C&B (now B&B Italia). With its playful swells and contours, the provocative work (nicknamed La Mamma for its resemblance to a fertility goddess) pushed the formal limits of polyurethane foam while making no secret of its feminist perspective. “It’s an image of a prisoner,” Pesce told AD. “Women suffer because of the prejudice of men. The chair was supposed to talk about this problem.”
Later, in the ’90s, his “jelly” aesthetics and experiments with resins and polymers matured through his Fish Design project.
Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939, Pesce was educated at IUAV and participated in the vanguard art collective Gruppo N in Padua. But it was New York City, where the designer began teaching at Pratt in 1980, that would become his home for the past several decades.
Despite the recent health concerns, there was no slowing down for Pesce. In 2022, he debuted a new collection with Cassina and unveiled a rainbow of 400 one-of-a-kind chairs for the set of Bottega Veneta’s spring-summer 2023 runway show (later on view at the label’s Design Miami showcase). This January in Paris, the multidisciplinary designer was presented the 2024 Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement award, a peer-to-peer honor from the Créateurs Design Awards program.
At the time of his passing, Pesce was preparing two activations for Milan Design Week 2024, commencing on April 15: A series of unreleased works will be on view in “Nice to See You,” a solo exhibition at Biblioteca Ambrosiana, while outdoor installation “L’Uomo Stanco,” presented in collaboration with the City of Milan, will be on display at the Piazza San Pio Xi.
His legacy lives on in the permanent collections of some of the most significant museums around the world, including MoMa and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Pompidou Center and the Louvre in Paris, and the Vitra Museum in Germany.
This story was originally published by AD Italia with additional reporting from Mel Studach.
