Gaetano Pesce’s playful forms to fill MOCA Pacific Design Center

One might expect to find gelato at a high-end Italian bistro, but a different sort of gelati misti will be filling MOCA Pacific Design Center: the candy-colored, functional forms of Italian architect and industrial designer Gaetano Pesce.

The forthcoming exhibition “Gaetano Pesce: Molds (Gelati Misti)” will feature the artist’s vibrant, handmade cast-resin works, all utilitarian-seeming objects with a humorous twist. Most of the works are Pesce’s floppy, pliable avant-garde vases, largely created in the last 25 years. His “Spaghetti” appears made from reddish-orange molded and pressed noodles; “Medusa” looks like a mangy head of thick, milky white, squiggles; “Vase With Hair” resembles a crimson, rubbery mop head.

“Some of them look like octopuses, jellyfish, squids. They’re meant to evoke the natural and organic even though they’re made with resin,” says MOCA senior curator Bennett Simpson, who organized the exhibition. “Pesce has been influential as someone working with resin and color, and these kind of organic, biomorphic forms. And he was influential as a kind of philosopher or theorist of design in the ’60s and ’70s, a very provocative guy.”

Also on view with Pesce’s “mixed ice cream” molds: his rainbow-hued Feltri chair, made from felt dipped in resin, and a few of his lamp bases, plus the artist’s so-called “industrial skins” made from poured resin. They’re glossy, painterly flat forms, often depicting a figurative element such as a foot or the back of the artist’s head. The exhibition also includes process sketches and Pesce’s handmade wooden molds.

“The work that made him famous, the chairs in the ’60s and ’70s, had political and social commentary,” Simpson says of the artist’s long career. “The vases are more decorative, but still super witty.”

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“Gaetano Pesce: Molds (Gelati Misti)”

Where: MOCA Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood

When: Sept. 3-Nov. 27

Info: (310) 289-5223; www.moca.org

Follow me on Twitter: @DebVankin

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