“Pieces from a Larger Puzzle” Debuts at Italian Cultural Institute, Los Angeles

Gaetano Pesce’s first solo West coast exhibition, Pieces from a Larger Puzzle, opens at the Italian Cultural Institute (IIC) of Los Angeles on July 7th at 8:30 p.m. This extensive retrospective of one of the most influential and independent minds of the architecture, art, and design worlds will survey objects produced throughout the arc of Pesce's award-winning career including prototypes, production models, video, and audio.

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition, bilingual catalog available exclusively at the IIC. Gaetano Pesce’s work is a most rare unification of industrial materials and design, handcraft, and fine art. Pesce has received the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Lawrence J. Israel Prize.

He has designed for the world’s most prestigious modern and contemporary furniture companies such as Cassina, B & B Italia, Bernini, and Knoll International. His architectural work includes the Organic Building of Osaka, the Children’s House for Parc de la Villette, the Gallery Mourmons in Belgium, and the New York office for advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day.

MOCA Los Angeles Director Jeffrey Deitch will deliver introductory remarks at the private exhibition opening at the Italian Cultural Institute. Gaetano Pesce will also receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the IIC presented by the Institute’s Director, Francesca Valente. Pesce’s exhibition will be Valente’s last for the IIC in her 30-year legacy of bringing Italian culture to North America.

Valente says, “This is an exhibition that I had dreamt of for a long time, and that has become a reality only now in Los Angeles.” She continues, “It is an appropriate tribute to one of the most radical and innovative artists of our time who has combined a bold use of color with new materials and technologies in both his architecture and design.”

Vittorio Sgarbi, the newly appointed curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, supervisor of acquisitions at Rome’s new MAXXi museum of 21st-century art, and renowned art critic will be making a special trip from Rome to attend Pesce’s opening.

Italian Cultural Institute

Gaetano Pesce: Pieces from a Larger Puzzle July 8 - August 31, 2010. Free and open to the public. 1023 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024. www.iiclosangeles.esteri.it

The private opening will be preceded by a one-hour free-to- the-public lecture at 7:00 p.m. by Gaetano Pesce at the nearby Hammer Museum. The lecture is free, however tickets are requi- red and are available at the Hammer’s Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start. Limit one ticket per personon a first come, first served basis.

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Boulevard (Wilshire and Westwood Blvd), Los Angeles, CA 90024. www.hammer.ucla.edu

Pieces From A Larger Puzzle is organized by the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles under the auspices of the Consul General of Italy, Nicola Faganello. The exhibition is co-sponsored by The Hammer Museum, Abitare, Alitalia, Azure Magazine, B&B Italia, Cassina, Domus, John and Jean Geresi, Los Angeles Modern Auctions, Meritalia, MICUCCI.

Gaetano Pesce, architect and designer, was born in 1939 in La Spezia, Italy. From his earliest manifesto at age 17, through his studies at the University of Venice Faculty of Architecture, his travels, his experimentation, his teaching, his work with renowned manufacturers Cassina, B & B Italia, Bernini and Knoll International, Pesce’s experience has been global and his innovations consistently groundbreaking.

Pesce’s multi-disciplinary works are in the permanent collects of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Germany’s Vitra Museum, the Montreal Museum of Art, as well as museums in Japan, Portugal and Finland. Pesce taught for 28 years at the Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes in Strasbourg, France.

He has lectured in the most prominent universities and cultural institutions around the world, including the Cooper Union in New York City, where he has made his home since 1980 after living in Venice, London, Helsinki and Paris. Pesce’s work – buildings, furniture, lighting, design competitions, urban studies, museum installations and theater/performance – provoke, inspire, awaken and celebrate color, new materials, political dimensions, the “poorly made,” the feminine, the figurate, the humane and all our senses, while opposing repetition, nostalgia and abstraction.

Pesce’s long advocacy of and research into advanced materials yield continual innovations in form and production, from the iconic “Up” series (1969), including “#5, La Mamma,” a chair of voluptuous proportions chained to an ottoman, the first such industrial product containing a political message, to the “Nobody’s Perfect” furniture, (2002), incorporating his “diversified series” concept: workers’ creative choices during the manufacturing process make each piece unique in color and texture.

Among Pesce’s notable museum exhibitions are his inclusion in the legendary Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” in 1972, the 1996 career retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, entitled “Gaetano Pesce: Le Temps des Questions,” and the “Gaetano Pesce: Il Rumore Del Tempo” exhibition at the 2005 Triennale di Milano. Pesce received the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1993 and the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Lawrence J. Israel Prize in 2009.