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Italian designer Gaetano Pesce has launched Dear Future, an exhibition at gallery The Future Perfect‘s Los Angeles location that presents a range of works created from the 1960s to the present.
On show in the Goldwyn House, The Future Perfect‘s LA mansion-cum-gallery, the Dear Future exhibition showcases Pesce’s early designs for brands such as B&B Italia alongside contemporary pieces.
“Ever since I was young, I have discovered that I have a particular attraction for everything that was supposed to occur,” said Pesce of the exhibition. “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.”
Concurrent with Frieze LA, Dear Future is the first solo show by the 83-year-old designer in Los Angeles.
The exhibition is a celebration of Pesce’s colourful style and insistence on creating “mass-produced originals”, where resin-based designs are repeated in ways that allow each piece to be slightly different.
This ethos came out of Pesce’s involvement with the Radical Design movement in Italy.
Set against the backdrop of the Beverly Hills manse, the exhibition showcases his works in an in-situ style, mixing the historically disparate pieces.
Among the historical designs is a reissue of Pesce’s UP5_6 chair – known as La Mamma – from a 1969 collection with B&B Italia.
The chair is a 2021 remake of the curved chair made from recycled bottle corks.
The exhibition also includes works from the Nobody’s Perfect collection, which first ran in 2002, and the abstract lamps from the Some of Us collection, which feature painted faces on irregularly shaped resin.
More recent designs on show include variations of the Leaf Shelf collection from 2022, as well as Multicolored Lamps with Rocks, a collection of lighting pieces also from 2022.
Pesce is known for his combination of “technological innovation” and “social critique”, according to the gallery.
“If modernist architecture and design disregarded the individual and attempted to standardize the human spirit, Pesce’s lifeswork has been to upend prescriptive modes of thinking – a form of counter-design that favors incoherence, unpredictability, eccentricity and originality,” said Future Perfect founder David Alhadeff.
“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.”
The exhibition also aimed to celebrate Pesce’s pursuit to “achieve diversity within standardization.”
“One work that exemplifies this pursual of imperfection is his Square Airport Lamp (1986/1994), a light sculpture consisting of a flexible membrane of rubber studded with miniature light bulbs and supported by fiberglass fishing rods and lead weights,” said The Future Perfect.
Other recent appearances by Pesce include a series of chairs created for the Bottega Veneta’s Spring/Summer 2023 runway in Milan. In 2019, some of his rarely-seen furniture was shown in New York’s Friedman Benda gallery.
Dear Future will be open to the public from 16 February to 31 March 2023. For other architecture and design events, exhibitions and fairs, visit Dezeen’s Event Guide.
The photography is by Rich Stapleton.
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