Gaetano PesceA Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A…

Salon 94 presents A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A... in New York, an exhibition curated by London-based Jamaican-Filipino artist Anthea Hamilton, bringing together a selection of archival works by Italian artist and designer Gaetano Pesce (1939–2024). Occupying the gallery’s first floor, the exhibition runs in parallel with Comfort Zones, a solo presentation of Hamilton’s work on the second floor, and Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued, an exhibition of newly fabricated works by the Gaetano Pesce Studio, on the third floor.

Anthea Hamilton first encountered Maestro Gaetano Pesce (1939–2024) in 2009, while studying at the Royal College of Art, London. Browsing the library, she pulled France Vanlaethem’s monograph on Pesce from the shelf after its spine caught her eye. On the cover was Vertical Loft (1982), which Hamilton initially understood as an actual building rather than a model. The book began Hamilton’s sustained engagement with Pesce’s work that has continued for more than fifteen years. Hamilton has spent years returning to the same handful of photographs, treating them not as references to be exhausted but as images with the capacity to continually make themselves new.

That method of sustained looking, rather than survey or completism, defines A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A…, Hamilton’s curation of Pesce at Salon 94 in New York. Drawn largely from Pesce’s archive, the exhibition brings together works that have shaped Hamilton’s own thinking—including UP7 (1969), Tramonto a New York (1980), the Golgotha table (1972), and a Nobody’s Perfect chair (2019)—alongside original drawings, material studies, prototypes, and proposals. Moving between some of Pesce’s most recognizable forms and the ideas and experiments that surrounded them, the exhibition asks what changes when objects Hamilton has known for years through images are finally present in the room.

Hamilton calls several of her selections “the pop stars of the practice.” Her interest is not in unearthing the obscure. “I’m not trying to uncover a hidden thing,” she says. “This isn’t a research project where the value lies in finding what no one has seen. There is always more space in the familiar images.” At the same time, Hamilton is drawn to material studies and unrealized proposals, which she describes as “the purest state of an idea,” before material or structural compromise has occurred.

Hamilton’s reading of Pesce gives equal weight to the object and its representation—the staged photographs, publications, models, and theatrical presentations through which his ideas move into the world. For Hamilton, these are not simply documentation, but part of how the work is understood and remembered. Her own relationship with Pesce began largely through such images, and their translation into physical space brings questions of scale and the body to the foreground.

“Whenever you put a body—or an image of a body—into something, it sets the scale through which everything else is read,” Hamilton says. Throughout Pesce’s practice, the human body provides a measure against which furniture, objects, and architecture are understood, while shifts in scale continually unsettle those relationships. “What I love is constantly changing the scale. You reorder yourself as you move around.” Humor is part of that constant reordering: Pesce’s willingness to exaggerate, disrupt function, and move freely between the bodily and the architectural.

Hamilton’s engagement with Pesce eventually moved from images to the artist himself. Before realizing his Project for a Door model (1970s) at monumental scale for her 2015 exhibition Lichen! Libido! Chastity!, curated by Ruba Katrib at SculptureCenter, she wanted to meet him. “If I was going to carry this person’s work forward, I wanted to check him out,” she recalls. Pesce gave his permission, beginning a relationship Hamilton understood as one of trust. Curating his work after his death brings what she describes as “a slight sense of vertigo”: the studio, gallery, and estate can offer “a network of voices,” she says, “but it is not him.”

A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A… brings Hamilton’s sustained looking into physical space, placing works she has returned to for years alongside drawings, prototypes, studies, and proposals that reveal Pesce’s ideas at different stages of becoming. Familiar works are not presented as conclusions, nor archival material simply as evidence of what came before. Together, they offer a portrait of a practice in which image and object, function and experiment, scale and the body remain continually in play.