WEIL AM RHEIN, GERMANY.-The Vitra Design Museum presents Gaetano Pesce – Il rumore del tempo, on view through January 8, 2006. An exhibition of the Triennale di Milano; curator: Silvana Annicchiarico. Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939 and a resident of New York from 1980 to the present, Gaetano Pesce is one of the most internationally influential designers of the last 40 years with his politically engaged and highly authentic body of work. Yet the exhibition is not honouring him with a classic retrospective. Instead, it employs individual stages of development to illuminate theoretical approaches and problems in Pesce’s work that have their roots in the past and yet were and continue to be forward-looking. Didactically, it does not focus on distanced objects, drawings and texts but also engages visitors on an emotional level through its radically staged presentation.

Eight themes are crystallised from the oeuvre of the artist that both illustrate the characteristics of his work and take up the current debate on product culture: Pesce’s personalisation of the series, his expressiveness, new materials and languages, femininity and masculinity, the definition of beauty and malformation, design as a political expression, design as a religious dimension, the participation of the senses. In addition to these eight themes an installation created especially for this exhibition, “La stanza del tempo”, focuses on the subjectivity of our relationship with time and, therefore, its inevitable relativity.