In 1972 Italian designer, architect, and artist Gaetano Pesce took part in the seminal MoMA exhibition “Italy The New Domestic Landscape” with his “underground room,” a scenario envisioning “the remains of a habitat from the year 2000 as found in the year 3000.” Also in 1972, Pesce (born 1939) presented the public with a piece of cloth in the shape of a dynamic seat cast in resin, his famous “Golgatha Chair.” Pesce, known today as one of Italy’s most famous – and perhaps most eccentric – designers, never ceased to experiment with unconventional uses of this and other materials since.A new exhibition at the Museum for Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA) now puts a focus on Pesce’s work with resin. Next to his colorful vases, the show presents chairs, lamps, and “industrial skins”: two-dimensional reliefs from cast resin on archaic sujets such as sexuality and motherhood.A survey of Pesce’s works, the exhibition is also interested in the processes behind his organically shaped and colorful creations, his experiments with the “medium’s infinite variation of pigmentation, transparency, and plasticity,” as a text issued for the exhibition explains.“Gaetano Pesce is a true icon of contemporary design,” MOCA Senior Curator Bennett Simpson, who organized the exhibition in collaboration with John R. Geresi, a scholar and collector of Pesce, says. “His cast resin works evoke bodies, fungi, lava flows, and ocean life—seductive and repellent in their strange beauty.”“Gaetano Pesce: Molds (Gelati Misti)” is on view through November 27, 2016 at MOCA Pacific Design Center. Click here for more information.See more photos in the slideshow Read more