The Future Perfect brings Gaetano Pesce’s considered creative imperfections to LA

“Ever since I was young, I have discovered that I have a particular attraction for everything that is supposed to occur. In other words, for all that is newly 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. In particular, what was about to happen to the so-called ‘culture’ of Design and Architecture?” Amid the creative and unusual bursts of colours and materials in his designs, it is no wonder that Gaetano Pesce extends his curiosity to what’s NEXT for the creative community. In his latest and first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles, titled Dear Future, Pesce presents to the world an array of works that along with his signature style dive into the future of design and architecture culture.

At The Future Perfect’s LA flagship, Goldwyn House, the Italian artist, industrial designer, and architect has a bountiful career having exhibited his visionary designs over five decades. Some of his most iconic designs feature new, never-before-seen works, alongside rarely exhibited historic pieces, as well as contemporary re-editions and variants. Pesce’s design philosophies have been driven by Radical Design—one of the most avant-garde movements in the history of design, that originated in Italy. The movement which began at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s opposed functionalism and the industrial appearance of design and architecture. Radical Design examples such as Superstudio’s table Quaderna and Pesce’s lounge chair La Mamma, brought forth a transdisciplinary approach to design which was imaginative, utopian, and creative.

“If Modernist architecture and design disregarded the individual and attempted to standardise the human spirit, Pesce’s lifework has been to upend prescriptive modes of thinking—a form of counter-design that favours incoherence, unpredictability, eccentricity and originality. His future is not one of myth—it is an attainable reality free of war, inequality and uniformity, where human individualism is expressed in objects and style,” shares David Alhadeff, founder of the gallery.

Pesce’s response to medical design approaches was first witnessed in the Up series, released with B&B Italia in 1969, with UP5 and UP6 also known as La Mamma, becoming the most famous from the series. The Dear Future exhibition presents 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. “When you submit yourself to La Mamma, the bosomy figure engulfs and overwhelms your senses, bringing instant comfort and calm. While Pesce originally produced the chair to comment on women’s rights at the height of second-wave feminism, the chair can also be seen as a representation of the 'Divine Feminine.' The tribute to the fertility goddess is complemented by an eight-foot-tall resin tapestry depicting a pregnant figure kneeling or praying, the two works jointly celebrating the feminine energy that surrounds us,” mentions Laura Young, gallery director.

The exhibition also presents his other works, including his light sculpture Square Airport Lamp (1986/1994), chairs from the Nobody’s Perfect series (2002/2019-present), abstract figurative lamps Some of Us (2000), the River Table (2012) and a collection of six monumental waterscapes Six Tables on Water, to name a few. The River Table is joined by a new series of Leaf Shelves (2022), which will be presented for the first time since their debut in Pesce’s solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum in 2022. “With Dear Feature, the artist will additionally debut the cabinet in a new colourway—multicoloured amber-green—and unveil a new series of Multicolored Lamps with Rocks (2022), cast in resin from stones collected by the artist himself. Reminiscent of the meditative act of precariously stacking and balancing stones on top of one another, the mound-like light sculptures at once illustrate humankind’s reverence of and interference with nature,” states the official release.

‘Gaetano Pesce: Dear Future’ exhibition is on display at The Future Perfect’s Goldwyn House in Los Angeles from February 16, 2023 – March 31, 2023.