Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued

Salon 94 Design presents Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued in New York, an exhibition celebrating the ongoing work of Gaetano Pesce (1939–2024), based in the artist's original workshop in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Over a sixty-year career, the Italian artist, designer, and architect achieved what few in his industry ever do, creating iconic designs with both international production brands and his own studio practice. Pesce's studio practice produced bodies of work with an ingenuity that could only come from his direct, hands-on knowledge; many works were never shared with a production facility or outside overseers, but were passed directly into the hands of his own studio.

Pesce famously welcomed anyone willing to learn this way, from trained artists to, in one case, a taxi driver who wandered in one day and stayed four valuable years. Until his death in 2024, Pesce arrived at his studio every day with a new drawing or a new idea, to initiate and guide its making in real time, working alongside his studio managers Alessandro Byther and Giulia Tosciri, who remain an integral part of the studio and Foundation today.

Few stayed as long, or worked as closely, the small team who spent collective decades at his side were specially trained to interpret a simple sketch or a conceptual idea by Pesce into a complex feat of engineering; pouring, folding, and moulding resin. He liked to say that no two works were ever identical; each piece was crafted to have its own unique personality, forming a singular bond with whoever encountered it.

Pesce's one-of-a-kind intellect is what distinguishes the studio's work from any conventional posthumous edition. Where many of his industrial collaborations were designed by him but manufactured by others, the works in Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued are inseparable from his direct, physical involvement – it marks the next chapter of that practice: the same studio, the same hands, carrying his designs forward.