Designed in 1969, right from the onset the Up series – of which Serie Up 2000 is an evolution – has been one of the most outstanding expressions of design with its expressive shapes upholstered with elastic fabric. This innovative solution, designed as a fragment of contemporary art to be offered to a wide audience, stems from B&B Italia’s extensive technological know-how in terms of polyurethane injection moulding.Read more
Designed in 1969, right from the onset the Up series – of which Serie Up 2000 is an evolution – has been one of the most outstanding expressions of design with its expressive shapes upholstered with elastic fabric. This innovative solution, designed as a fragment of contemporary art to be offered to a wide audience, stems from B&B Italia’s extensive technological know-how in terms of polyurethane injection moulding. The series consists of seven pieces, including the sofa upholstered in a variety of colours.
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Concept
B&B Italia has an extensive amount of technological know-how (the technology of polyurethane injection moulding, for example) and it uses this information to build its company. Now, it has decided to give the creation of Mr. Pesce, the UP series, the most appropriate language to express this technology, and also to turn it into a fragment of contemporary art to offer to a vast public. In 1969, a series of sofas and armchairs called “Serie UP” came out, a total of seven pieces. They were ahead of the times for the project that generated them, and also for the technical procedures used to make them.
Gaetano Pesce, architect, artist and designer, in forty years of career has carried out public and private projects in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia in the fields of architecture, urban planning, interior design, industrial and exhibition design, driven by a constant tension towards innovation and experimentation.
Born in La Spezia in 1939, Pesce studied architecture at the University of Venice and wrote a manifesto in his youth in defense of the right to inconsistency in art, the need to change, to be free, not to repeat ourselves. The boundaries between art, design and industry become irrelevant in his production, because even art is a product, it is the creative response to the needs of the time in which we live. His continuous research in the field of advanced materials, languages and technology has resulted in iconic productions such as the Up series (1969), composed of seven examples of seats with voluptuous shapes, including the Up5_6 armchair, the first product of industrial design called to convey a political message, to denounce the condition of women in the world.
Pesce's multidisciplinary work is represented in the permanent collections of the most important museums in the world including the MoMa and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Vitra Museum in Germany and the Montreal Museum of Art, to name a few. His approach to design has marked its history and his works have been celebrated in exhibitions of extraordinary importance. Numerous companies produce his projects.