LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents Gaetano Pesce: Molds (Gelati Misti), a selection of cast-resin objects made by internationally lauded Italian artist Gaetano Pesce, organized by MOCA Senior Curator Bennett Simpson. Focusing on Pesce’s well-known vases, with their colorful, pliable, body-like forms, the exhibition also includes a selection of chairs, lamps, and two-dimensional cast-resin reliefs that the designer calls “industrial skins.”
Organized by Simpson with noted Pesce collector and scholar John R. Geresi, the exhibition will highlight Pesce’s long involvement with resin, molds, and casting techniques, and will feature a group of the designer’s purpose-built wooden molds, as well as process drawings and video. For more than four decades, Pesce has produced work spanning architecture, exhibition, and industrial design. His vessels embody the playful eccentricities of his aesthetic and exemplify his chosen medium’s infinite variation of pigmentation, transparency, and plasticity.
"Gaetano Pesce is a true icon of contemporary design," says Simpson. "His cast resin works evoke bodies, fungi, lava flows, and ocean life—seductive and repellent in their strange beauty. It is an honor to bring his work to MOCA."
“I hope my work is acknowledged for its multidisciplinary nature and its curious diversity,” remarks artist Gaetano Pesce.
Though many of his vases (Amazonias, Twins, Rock, Spaghetti, Pompitou, Medusa, and Tre Piedi) have structural foundations that begin with the same bullet-shaped underpinnings, their final forms are anything but identical. Each bares the process of its own making, capturing gravity and the velocity of Pesce’s hand, which renders some things humorously anthropomorphic or blithe and painterly, and others unsettlingly corporeal.
Gaetano Pesce was born in 1939, La Spezia, Italy. He has led a forty-plus-year career of exuberant and groundbreaking work in architecture, urban planning, interior, exhibition, and industrial design. His engagement with the avant-garde began with his studies in architecture from 1958 to 1963 at the University of Venice, where he became one of the founding members of Gruppo N, a collective focused on expanding the idea of programmed art that emerged out of the Bauhaus movement. During his college years, Pesce worked at three notable Murano glass factories: Moretti, Vistosi, and Venini; this occupational education in Venetian glasswork has informed much of the way he wields and approaches resin as a part of his current practice.
Geresi has written, "Pesce's work in resin is an extension of the 20th century's greatest Italian glass artist and is as continuous with that tradition as can be believed."
His career has also led him to teaching at prestigious institutions such as Cooper Union, New York; Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, Strasbourg, France; Domus Academy, Milan; and the Architectural School of São Paulo. He has mounted over two dozen solo exhibitions and featured in a number of group exhibitions, most notably the seminal 1972 exhibition The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Pesce's work is featured in more than 30 permanent collections across the world, including MoMA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre in Paris.
Gaetano Pesce: Molds (Gelati Misti) is organized by MOCA Senior Curator Bennett Simpson with John Geresi, and with curatorial support by Executive Assistant to the Chief Curator Hana Cohn.
