Design Miami/ 2019

Salon 94 Design presents a new body of wrapped leather lounges and chairs by Jay Sae Jung Oh, alongside a selection of rare Gaetano Pesce drawings and resin skins dating from the 1960s to the present.

South Korean born Jay Sae Jung Oh is a Seattle based designer whose leather chairs of stacked and piled found toys and objects are widely coveted. With her ongoing Savage series, Jay intricately and painstakingly hand wraps in raw leather, her shaped and seemingly jerry-rigged, house hold objects. The manufactured plastic objects are conspicuously transformed and unified into unexpected loungers, stools and even a planter, making a strong statement about the cultural condition of abundance and obsolescence. With the care of their makers, Jay re-imagines the most mundane objects into a fantastical buried treasure hunt.

Jay has served as a visiting professor at The University of Illinois at Chicago in Industrial Design, and has worked alongside maestro Gaetano Pesce. Her work is widely exhibited and featured in publications worldwide, her designs can be seen in the permanent collections at both the Carnegie Museum of Art, and Cranbrook Art Museum.

Gaetano Pesce’s drawings and resin skins are an essential element of his process, and show a direct intimate account of his experimental practice. Dating from the late 1960s, this selection of drawings highlight the inner workings of Pesce’s physical, hands-on practice, his interest in figuration, his humor and his fantasy architecture. Several rare drawings of the Pratt and Up Chair, share Pesce's early ideas for radical design and performance.

Born in La Spezia, 1939, Gaetano Pesce studied architecture at Venice University. Gaetano Pesce, architect, artist, and designer, has created public and private projects worldwide, in the fields of architecture, town planning, interior design, and industrial and exhibition design. In Pesce’s production, the borders between art, design, and industry become irrelevant because art is also a product, it is the creative reply to the needs of the times today.

Pesce’s work has been celebrated in exhibitions of outstanding importance, such as, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape held at the MoMA in 1972; a solo show in the Goodwin Gallery of MoMA in 1977; the retrospective Gaetano Pesce: Le Temps Des Questions, organized in 1996 in the Centre Georges Pompidou; Pushing The Limits, held in the Philadelphia museum of art in 2005; Gaetano Pesce: Il Rumore del Tempo, at the Milan Triennale, also in 2005; The Retrospective il Tempo Della Diversitá, at the MAXXI in Rome in 2014, and the retrospective II Tempo Multidiscilpinare in Padua in 2018.

Also on display will also be a presentation of Karl Fritsch's rings! In an explosion of creative energy over the last year, Fritsch has combined what seems to be endless variations of precious stones with non-traditional materials. Often times cutting and carving the stones himself, Fritsch has opened up an entirely new range of possibilities that build up—and dismantle—classic notions and categories of the good and the beautiful.