Back in September, Matthieu Blazy, the new creative director of Bottega Veneta, commissioned architect, artist, and designer Gaetano Pesce to create a temporary site-specific artwork as the set for the brands Spring Summer 23 show in Milan. The set, which was a vast, glossy space filled with 400 vividly coloured resin chairs and a matching resin floor, acted as the host of Blazy's second collection in the hot seat at Bottega Veneta.
Now, for Design Miami, the collaboration between the Italian House and Pesce is set to continue, with an exhibition at the flagship fair, where a selection of the Come Stai? chairs – the name Pesce gave the 400 show chairs – will be displayed and available to purchase at the exhibition and online.
The chairs are a new design for Pesce, and his first original chair for several years. Crafted of cotton canvas based on traditional toile fabric, the chairs have then been dipped in coloured resin and occasionally adorned with hand drawings. Each chair is unlike the one before. To communicate the launch of the chairs in the retail space, Blazy and Pesce have teamed up with Kate Moss, who in an image and video, poses nude on one of the chairs that feature a hand drawn Bottega Veneta logo.
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"This chair is a tribute to diversity." Pesce said in a press release, "It is about the human being; we are all different. People who say we are all the same – f**k them! We are all different and this is our defining quality – otherwise, we are just a copy. We are all originals and this is one of the themes of my design." He says.
Come Stai? will be accompanied by a new book which was commissioned by Blazy and Bottega Veneta with Pesce, and features an insightful interview between Pesce and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The limited-edition publication reportedly explores "the ideation, approach, and process of the collaboration, uncovering the many connections between Pesce and Blazy’s creative practices and values." According to a press release.
Contributions from Blazy and Maria Cristina Didero will feature, in order to document the project’s origins and place in Pesce’s wider oeuvre, while a vivid layer of photographs by Stephen Shore and Sander Muylaert illustrate the chair’s development and production. The volume carries over the Come Stai? design with an atypical profile informed by the chair shape, with a cover inspired by the chairs’ materials. Just like the Come Stai? chairs, each book cover is unique.
A book signing with Gaetano Pesce will take place on 30 November from at the exhibition space in Miami, as well as an artist talk between Pesce and Design Miami curatorial director Maria Cristina Didero on the same date.
