Gaetano Pesce / Salon 94 New York

Salon 94 in New York presents A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A…, an exhibition of archival works by Italian artist and designer Gaetano Pesce (1939–2024), curated by Anthea Hamilton. Installed on the gallery’s first floor, it runs alongside Hamilton’s solo show Comfort Zones on the second floor and Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued on the third.Hamilton first encountered Pesce’s work in 2009 through a monograph. The exhibition draws from his archive and includes familiar pieces such as UP7 (1969), Tramonto a New York (1980), and the Golgotha table (1972), together with drawings, material studies, and prototypes. It emphasizes both iconic objects and the images, models, and proposals through which they circulate, highlighting questions of scale, the body, and how well-known works change when encountered in person.

Salon 94: Gaetano Pesce: A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A…; Salon 94 Design: Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued. September 16, New York.

Exhibition texts (excerpt):

Salon 94 presents A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A… in New York, an exhibition curated by London-based 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 read 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), and the Golgotha table (1972)—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 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 to expand into 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 sense of vertigo”: the studio, gallery, and estate can offer “a network of voices,” she says, “but it is not him.”

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.