Gaetano Pesce, influential designer, 84
Gaetano Pesce, an impish, boundary-blurring artist and architect who flouted convention with a sensibility that was at once playful and political, creating works that ranged from a voluptuous armchair meant to spark debate about sexism to a plant-clad office building that served as a vertical garden, died April 3 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by a representative of his New York gallery, Salon 94, who said Mr. Pesce had a stroke several days earlier.
An Italian native who lived in New York for more than four decades, Mr. Pesce was a mad scientist of design, experimenting with viscous, flexible materials while creating work that could be witty, unnerving and downright revolutionary.
Scorning the clean lines and hard edges of 20th-century modernism, he embraced curvilinear forms, highly saturated colors and a handcrafted aesthetic that made room for variation and imperfection. He placed his stamp on plates, tables, lamps and couches, as well as a private home in Brazil and a corporate headquarters in Manhattan, where he helped pioneer the open-office concept.
“I always work in a multidisciplinary way, because I believe that art and expression have no barriers,” he told the New York Times’ T Magazine in 2022. “One day, you have an idea for a poem; the next, you have an idea for a song. The best artists are also physicians, mathematicians and musicians. That’s how I like to work.”
Mr. Pesce was perhaps best known for his bulbous “Up” chair, also known as “La Mamma,” a vacuum-packed creation that he developed in the late 1960s. Taken out of vinyl packaging that kept it flat as a pancake, the polyurethane armchair would slowly rise from the floor, like one of today’s mail-order mattresses, before assuming its full shape, which resembled a buxom female figure.
The design was inspired by statutes of ancient fertility goddesses, according to Mr. Pesce.
“It’s an image of a prisoner,” he told Architectural Digest in 2017, nearly five decades after creating the seat. “Women suffer because of the prejudice of men. The chair was supposed to talk about this problem.”