Pesce has been awarded diverse prizes including the prestigious Chrysler award for innovation and design in 1993; Architektur and Wohnen Designer of the Year in 2006; and the Lawrence J. Israel Prize from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2009. Pesce’s works have been celebrated in exhibitions of outstanding importance, such as Italy: The New Domestic Landscape held at the MoMA in 1972; the retrospective Gaetano Pesce: Le temps des questions, organized in 1996 in the Centre Pompidou; Pushing the limits, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2005; Gaetano Pesce: Il Rumore Del Tempo, at the Milan Triennale, also in 2005; L’Italia in Croce di Gaetano Pesce at the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011; the retrospective Il tempo della diversitá, at the MAXXI in Rome in 2014; Gaetano Pesce: Molds (Gelati Misti) at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in 2016; and Nobody’s Perfect, an exhibition that traveled across China in 2021-2022, showing in Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai. In Fall 2022, Pesce launched 'Come Stai?', a limited edition furniture collection commissioned by Bottega Venta, which debuted in an installation the artist created for the Italian fashion house’s Spring/Summer ’23 runway show.