Dear Future, the first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles by the pioneering Italian artist, industrial designer and architect, Gaetano Pesce (b. 1939, Italy), is on view now at the Goldwyn House. Dear Future, which spans over five decades of Pesce’s visionary designs (1969-2022), will open on the ground floor of The Future Perfect’s Los Angeles location in conjunction with Los Angeles Art Week 2023.
Driven by curiosity and radical thinking, Pesce is celebrated worldwide for blurring boundaries between art, design and architecture, and for provocatively combining social critique with an experimental pursuit of material and technological innovation. This mode of thought stems from Pesce’s early alignment with Radical Design — a movement born out of a tumultuous period of civil unrest and economic turmoil in Italy, and defined by a generation of Italian architects’ rebellious opposition to the hyper-rationalism, functionalism and industrial perfection of 20th-century Modernism.
Pesce’s unique approach to social critique through expressive forms and atypical materials can be traced to his first major line of furniture: his Up series, released with B&B Italia in 1969. His most famous work from the series, UP5_6 — also known as La Mamma — is a curvaceous armchair with ample, feminine proportions reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf. For Dear Future, Pesce will present a new edition of the chair made of recycled bottle corks sourced from Italy — one of only two ever made, produced in 2021 by B&B Italia.
“Ever since I was young, I have discovered that I have a particular attraction for everything that was supposed to occur. In other words, for all that is new arriving from the Future. As a result, not being satisfied with what had already taken shape, I set about wondering what the Future was revealing to us,” Pesce reflects. “In particular, what was about to happen to the so-called ‘culture’ of Design and Architecture. In the beautiful exhibition in Los Angeles there will be some examples of what I have just expressed. Enjoy your visit.”
Dear Future will be open through March 31st, 2023 in The Goldwyn House.