The Aspen Art Museum presents My Dear Mountains, an exhibition by Gaetano Pesce, one of the world’s most influential living multidisciplinary artists and creative minds, celebrated worldwide for his provocative and experimental pursuit of material, technological and social innovation. Driven by risk-taking curiosity and radical thinking, Pesce’s work is renowned for blurring boundaries between art, design, and architecture. Supported by the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020), a program of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture to promote Italian contemporary art in the world, Gaetano Pesce’s new project was conceived especially for the Aspen Art Museum and features a monumental site-specific installation covering the whole façade of the museum with a figurative image of the sun setting over a mountain landscape. This large outdoor intervention on the building—the artist’s first-ever façade—is accompanied by a display of his furniture, drawings, and sculptures within the museum’s ground floor gallery. Pesce’s motto is that architecture should be a distinctive portrait of those who inhabit it. Very much in this spirit, My Dear Mountains responds to the existing architectural features of the Aspen Art Museum by introducing a symbolic— almost naïve—view of mountains to take over the whole architectural façade and allow the building to declare its situated identity from the surface. Realized as a three-dimensional structure from a figurative landscape drawing by Pesce, this new intervention binds the exterior
of the museum to its iconic surroundings and celebrates the natural features for which Aspen is known. The works featured in My Dear Mountains span over fifty years of production and experimentation in different techniques and mediums— from the iconic Yeti armchair drawing (1968) to a new series of Leaf Cabinets (2022) and My Mountains vases (2022), realized specially for the Aspen Art Museum and exhibited with unique flower arrangements by Eliza Ryan. Working primarily with polyurethane resin, Pesce’s designs exuberantly embrace figuration and color, challenging the physical properties of materials and valuing the aesthetic outcomes of imperfect gestures over rigorous standards. His works seek to give form to what he calls “the liquidity of our time”—a time whose nature is defined by continuous change, curiosity, uncertainty, and innovation. These principles are reflected and find expression in the use of fluid materials that allow the artist to pursue objects that, in his words, are sincere and truthful to their epoch.
Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939, Gaetano Pesce studied Architecture at the University of Venice between 1958 to 1963 and was a participant in Gruppo N, an early collective concerned with programmed art patterned after the Bauhaus. He taught architecture at the Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg, France, for 28 years; Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh; Domus Academy in Milan; Polytechnic of Hong Kong; Architectural School of Sao Paulo; and the Cooper Union in New York City, where he has lived and worked since 1980. Pesce’s work can be found in the permanent collections of over 30 national and
international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in both New York and San Francisco; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Vitra Museum in Germany; Pompidou Center and Musee des Arts Dé coratifs of Louvre in Paris; and Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His award-winning designs include the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1993, the Architektur and Wohnen Designer of the Year in 2006, and the Lawrence J. Israel Prize from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2009. Gaetano Pesce is represented by Salon 94 Design.
Proceeds from the sale of these works support the Aspen Art Museum. For additional information and sales inquiries, please contact Jaclyn Carr at jcarr@aspenartmuseum.org or ask a member of staff.
Gaetano Pesce, Self Portrait Cabinet (medium model), 2022. Polyurethane resin. 9.5 × 7 × 2 in. Photo Clemens Kois. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94 Design
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