Objects of Our Time: The Legacy of Gaetano Pesce

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Join writer and curator Dr. Glenn Adamson as he discusses the creative vision of Italian architect, artist, and design pioneer Gaetano Pesce (1939-2024). Completely dedicated to personal expression, Pesce loved working with manufacturers, finding ways to push them to embrace experimental processes. Most of all, Pesce believed in making what he called “objects of our time.” That meant working in plastic and other modern materials. It meant constant innovation. Yet in retrospect, we can see that his great subject was the human condition itself, which never truly changes. All these things were true of him, all at once. Now Pesce is gone; his remarkable, completely incoherent oeuvre – tragic and joyful, ecstatic and conceptual, anarchic and precise – is complete at last. And his impact on the future of design is just beginning.

Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in New York and London. The author most recently of A Century of Tomorrows (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Gaetano Pesce: The Complete Incoherence (Monacelli, 2023), he is currently Curator at Large for the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, Artistic Director for Design Doha – a biennial festival in Qatar – and editor of Material Intelligence, a quarterly online journal published by the Chipstone Foundation.