Gaetano Pesce

Kindly donated by Bottega Veneta

“This is my first design of a bag, and it is figurative – two mountains with a sunrise or a sunset behind. I wanted a bag with an optimistic view. There is a capacity to realize anything at Bottega Veneta and this bag opens a way to express future design. The design of the future has to be figurative, and it has to communicate – such an object has to tell a story.” Gaetano Pesce

Embracing figuration and stories of the personal rather than the purely functional, Pesce’s bags utilize the idiosyncratic both in terms of handcraft and creativity. Based on mountains and prairies, the handbags echo his early life in Italy growing up near the mountains in Este, and the prairies of America, a reflection of where he lives today.

Realized by Bottega Veneta’s leather workers and artisans, the signature intrecciato is utilized once more, yet in a completely new way according to Pesce’s sketches. The smooth mountains and the grassy prairies are reflected in the unique, intensely handcrafted techniques to startling and joyful effect. Each glossy intrecciato bag is individually painted with an airbrush technique to resemble Pesce’s watercolor rendering with respect to the mountains in nappa leather.

The edition comes with a certificate signed by the artist including the statement below:

“My love of mountains, with their interruption of the surface, something that always makes us look up, goes back to the time of my youth. At that time in my life I lived in Este, a small town south of Venice. I saw hills from my window that seemed like mountains to me, their image the subject of my very first drawings. ‘My Dear Mountains’ also became the subject of this bag, the first I have designed. It recalls a cherished memory: two mountains with a sun rising between them. For me, this has always been a symbol of a new time; it is a time turning towards the future, a time of freedom, of discovery and invention. These strong convictions are at the basis of this bag, which is not abstract but figurative; it is based on a memory of the place of my youth together with that continued upward gaze.” 

Gaetano Pesce

New York, March 2023

The bag was produced in 2023 as part of a limited edition of 15, which is already sold out. 

Gaetano Pesce (b. 1939, La Spezia, Italy, lives and works in New York). In a career spanningfifty years, guided by a constant drive towards innovation and experimentation, Gaetano Pesce, architect, artist and designer, has created public and private projects in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia, in the fields of architecture, town planning, interior design, and industrial and exhibition design.

Herbert Muschamp, the authoritative architecture critic, presented Pesce’s multidisciplinary work as “the architectural equivalent of a brainstorm” and it is displayed in the permanent collections of the most important museums in the world, including the Moma, the New York Metropolitan Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Vitra Museum in Germany, the Montreal Museum of Art and various other museums in Japan, Portugal and Finland.

Pesce has been awarded diverse prizes, including the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1993, Architektur und Wohnen Designer of the Year in 2006 and the Lawrence J. Israel award from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2009. His approach to design has gone down in history and his works have been celebrated in exhibitions of outstanding importance, such as Italy: The New Domestic Landscape held at the MoMA in 1972; the retrospective Gaetano Pesce: Le Temps des Questions, organised in 1996 in the Centre Georges Pompidou; Pushing the Limits, held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2005; Gaetano Pesce: Il rumore del tempo, at the Milan Triennale, also in 2005; the retrospective Il Tempo della Diversitá, at the MAXXI in Rome in 2014.

Companies that have carried out his projects include Cassina, B&B Italia, Bernini, Knoll International, Venini, Swarovski, Meritalia and Zerodisegno.

Born in La Spezia in 1939, Pesce studied architecture at Venice University and when he was young, wrote a manifesto defending the right to incoherence in art, the need for change, to be free, and not to repeat oneself. During the course of the following 28 years, Pesce taught at Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes Urbaines in Strasburg, Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, the Accademia Domus in Milan, the Hong Kong Polytechnic, the School of Architecture in São Paulo and the Cooper Union in New York, where he moved in 1980 after having lived in Venice, London, Helsinki and Paris.

In Pesce’s production, the borders between art, design and industry become irrelevant because art is also a product, it is the creative reply to the needs of the times we are living in. His continuous research in the field of advanced materials, languages and technology has been translated into iconic productions such as the series Up (1969), made of seven voluptuous-shaped chairs, including Up #5, La Mamma, the first industrial design product bearing a political message, that of denouncing the condition of women in the world. In 2002 the design collection Nobody’s Perfect, made with polyurethane elastic resin, marked the birth of Pesce’s idea of “diversified series”: the creative choices of craftsmen that produce the pieces, giving them an unrepeatable colour and texture. Pesce refuses repetition and abstraction but he loves colour, new materials, political content, “misdeeds”, provocations, the feminine, the figurative, the human and all our five senses. His restructuring of the seat of the advertising agency TWBA/Chiat/Day in Manhattan (1995) was described by the New York Times as “an extraordinary work of art that clearly stands out from the lucid rigour of the aesthetics we have ended up associating with modernity.” Built between 1989-1993 in Osaka, Japan, his Organic Building, the façade of which is a vertical garden, has been declared a public monument by the city. In 2011 Pesce presented the installation L’Italia in Croce, displayed at the Triennale Museo del Design in Milan and at the Venice Biennale.

In 2012, at the David Gill Gallery in London he exhibited Six Tables on Water, a collection of tables-landscapes representing the surface, density and changing colours of water in its diverse forms: oceans, lagoons, ponds, and puddles, from a bird-eye’s view. In 2016 in Florence, it was with Maestà Tradita (exhibition at Museo Novecento and an installation in Piazza S. Maria Novella) that once again Pesce denounced the difficult conditions of women in contemporary society and the underlying hypocrisy that often undermines change. The huge figure of a woman covered in what appear to be sheds of meat, resting on a throne that evokes the shapes of UP5, symbolizing the vain, empty idea of

splendor.

In 2017 at the Museo del Vetro in Murano, Gaetano Pesce presented the result of his glass experiments made from 1988 to 1992 at C.I.R.V.A in Marseille, which led to the invention of five new revolutionary techniques of processing this material. In the same year, at the historical complex of Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, the exhibition “Architecture and Figuration” celebrates the artist’s visionary creativity with the display of some of his most relevant architectural projects.

In 2018 the Palazzo Della Ragione in Padua Italy held a large retrospective of his work. In 2019 for Milan Design week Gaetano Pesce installed in the Piazza del Duomo a 26 foot tall version of his infamous UP 5_6 chair, which celebrated its 50 th year anniversary that year. In 2021, Gaetano Pesce had his first solo tour exhibition in Asia. In 2022, Gaetano Pesce created the show space for Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore outing at Bottega Veneta in Milan, comprising a poured resin floor and 400 unique chairs. In 2023 the collaboration continued with a site-specific installation “Vieni a Vedere” presented during Salone del Mobile 2023. In June of the same year, Monacelli/Phaidon released the monograph on Gaetano Pesce’s life and work titled “The Complete Incoherence” written by Glenn Adamson.