ASPEN, CO.- Nicola Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon Director of the Aspen Art Museum, today announced that it will unveil My Dear Mountains, a new large-scale, site-specific project by Gaetano Pesce (b. Italy, 1939), in spring 2022. Conceived especially for the Aspen Art Museum, the project will cover the museum’s entire façade with a monumental inflatable structure with an image of the sun setting over a mountain landscape. This ambitious outdoor project is the artist’s first façade intervention and will be accompanied by a display of Pesce’s furniture and sculptures within the museum’s ground-floor gallery which will further highlight the multifaceted, artistic nature of his practice.

My Dear Mountains is curated by Stella Bottai and supported by the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020), a program of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture to promote Italian contemporary art around the world.

AAM Director Nicola Lees said, “The Aspen Art Museum is proud to present My Dear Mountains by Gaetano Pesce, one of the world’s most influential living multidisciplinary artists and creative minds. Celebrated worldwide for a provocative and experimental pursuit of material, technological, and social innovation, Pesce’s work is driven by risk-taking curiosity and radical thinking, blurring the boundaries between art, design, and architecture. This site-specific work is a celebration of Aspen, which is fitting since it was the first U.S. city the artist visited in 1971 when he attended the International Design Conference.”

Project curator Stella Bottai said, “Very much in the spirt of Pesce’s motto that architecture should be a distinctive portrait of those who inhabit it, My Dear Mountains responds to the existing architectural features of the Aspen Art Museum introducing a symbolic figurative image. This three-dimensional inflatable structure, inspired by Pesce’s landscape drawing, will bind the exterior façade of the museum to its iconic surroundings, while celebrating the natural features for which Aspen is so famous.”

Gaetano Pesce said, “The legacy of the International Style of architecture continues to produce buildings that avoid documenting the realities they inhabit, each of which has its specific identity and geographic location. For the Aspen Art Museum, I have risked creating a kitschy image for the sake of replacing the building’s gridlike façade with a view that is close to the one I admired during the memorable time I have spent in Aspen, the first city I visited in the United States and a place to which I have returned with pleasure over the years.”

Gaetano Pesce’s career spans more than fifty years and nearly every medium, moving fluidly and playfully across categorical definitions of objecthood. Making a virtue of incoherence, Pesce has remained independent from the sectors of mass industrial production and commercial distribution, prioritizing his stance as an artist and intellectual. Pesce’s practice reflects his interests in introducing cultural values that foster diversity and plurality rather than pleasing market trends and demands. His designs stand out for their figurative and often organic qualities, which disrupt and challenge the uniform neutral aesthetic seen in many contemporary buildings and products across the globe.

Pesce’s irreverent critique addresses the wider social and cultural implications of what he believes to be the ubiquity of the International Style and its legacy in the present day, a concept that he defines as “Cosmetic Formalism.” According to Pesce, the rigorous patterns and modular repetition of the abstract geometrical vocabulary fail to reflect and express the idiosyncrasies of specific contexts and geographies and contribute to the increasing homogenization of urban landscapes around the world.

Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939, Gaetano Pesce studied Architecture at the University of Venice between 1958 to 1963 and was a participant in Gruppo N, an early collective concerned with programmed art patterned after the Bauhaus. He taught architecture at the Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg, France, for 28 years; Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Domus Academy in Milan; Polytechnic of Hong Kong; Architectural School of Sao Paulo; and the Cooper Union in New York City, where has lived and worked since 1980. Pesce’s work can be found in the permanent collections of over 30 U.S. and international museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Vitra Design Museum, Rhein, Germany; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Pompidou Center, Paris; and Musee des Arts Décoratifs, located in the Louvre in Paris. His award-winning designs have been recognized with the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1993, the 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. Gaetano Pesce is represented by Salon 94 Design.