by Italian designer Gaetano Pesce has created Dear Future, an exhibition at The Future Perfect gallery in Los Angeles that showcases a range of work created from the 1960s to the present day.
The Dear Future exhibition, on view at Goldwyn House, The Future Perfect’s Los Angeles mansion and gallery, features Pesce’s early designs for brands like B&B Italia alongside contemporary pieces.
“Ever since I was young I have discovered that I have a special attraction to everything that should happen,” Pesce said of the exhibition. “So for everything that comes new from the future.”
“So I was not satisfied with what was already taking shape and set about wondering what the future would hold for us.”
Running parallel to Frieze LA, Dear Future is the 83-year-old designer’s first solo gallery show in Los Angeles.
The exhibition celebrates Pesce’s colorful style and his insistence on creating “mass-produced originals,” where resin-based designs are repeated in such a way that each piece is slightly different.
This ethos grew out of Pesce’s involvement in the Radical Design movement in Italy.
Set against the backdrop of the Beverly Hills mansion, the exhibition displays his works in an in situ style, mixing the historically distinct pieces.
Among the historical designs is the prototype of Pesce’s UP5_6 chair – known as La Mamma – based on a design from a 1969 collection with B&B Italia.
The chair is a 2021 re-edition of the curved chair made from recycled bottle corks.
The exhibition also includes works from the Nobody’s Perfect collection, first shown in 2002, and the abstract lamps from the Some of Us collection, which feature painted faces on irregularly shaped resin.
More recent designs on display include variations from the 2022 Leaf Shelf collection, as well as Multicolour Lamps with Rocks, a collection of lighting pieces also from 2022.
Pesce is known for his combination of “technological innovation” and “social criticism,” according to the gallery.
“If modernist architecture and design disregarded the individual and attempted to standardize the human spirit, Pesce’s life’s work was to turn prescribed ways of thinking on their head – a form of counter-design that favors incoherence, unpredictability, eccentricity and originality,” said David, Founder of Future Perfect Alhadeff.
“Its future is not a myth – it is an attainable reality free from war, inequality and uniformity, in which human individualism is expressed in objects and style.”
The exhibition also aimed to celebrate Pesce’s quest to “achieve diversity within standardization”.
“A work that exemplifies this pursuit of imperfection is his Square Airport Lamp (1986/1994), a light sculpture composed of a flexible rubber membrane studded with miniature light bulbs and supported by fiberglass rods and lead weights,” said The Future Perfect .
Other recent appearances by Pesce include a set of chairs designed for Bottega Veneta’s Spring/Summer 2023 runway in Milan. In 2019, some of his rarely seen furniture was shown at New York’s Friedman Benda gallery.
Dear Future is open to the public from February 16 to March 31, 2023. For more architecture and design events, exhibitions and fairs, see Dezeen’s Event Guide.
Photograph by Rich Stapleton.
