Gaetano Pesce

Born in La Spezia in 1939, he began his studies in 1959 at the IUAV of Venice, and simultaneously at the "Istituto superiore di disegno industriale". He participated in the foundation of the Gruppo N (for "programmed art") of Padua, and collaborated with the German Gruppo Zero, with the Paris based Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuelle ,and with the Milan based Gruppo T. He started exhibiting his works in 1964. IN 1965, he presented the "Primo manifesto per un'architettura elastica" ('First Manifesto for an elastic architecture) at the conference "Society in architecture", in Jyvaskyla, Finland. Ever since his beginnings, he was interested in visual communication and interior design. In 1972, he was invited to the exhibition "Italy: the new domestic landscape" at the MOMA in New York, as a representative of Italian Radical architecture. In 1973, he he was one of the founders of Global Tools. In 1975, the Centre Pompidou dedicates the exhibition "Le futur est peut-etre passé" to his work. Since 1983, he has lived and worked in New York, where he taught at the Cooper Union School of Architecture and Art from 1985 to 1987. Pesce is, without a doubt, a versatile creator, able to confer intensity to any project in both design (UP series, 1969) and architecture (the controversial competition "Pahlavi National Library" in Teheran, 1978). To Pesce, both architecture and design are one of many artistic languages, a means to express his ideology, an act of protest against institutionalised systems.