Boston’s cityscape just welcomed a new sculpture by Gaetano Pesce. The late, great Italian designer’s final public artwork, (2024–25), has landed on Lyrik Back Bay, joining the city’s blossoming public art scene.
certainly holds its own, towering 30 feet tall and radiating a warm red glow that echoes the highway’s streaming taillights in the evening. This is Pesce’s only permanent outdoor sculpture to grace America—and it just might prove iconic enough to rival Anish Kapoor’s famed (2006) sculpture in Chicago.
Gaetano Pesce, (2024-25). Lyrik Back Bay, Samuels and Associates, Boston, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Goodman Taft. Photo: Aram Boghosian (AramPhoto). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz / London.
Pesce famously worked across art, architecture, and design—eschewing creative categories, while prioritizing innovation. As aesthetics have grown more uniform and utilitarian over the past few decades, he embraced playfulness and imperfection, especially favoring unpredictable resin.
Boston-based developer Samuels and Associates commissioned Pesce’s for Lyrik Back Bay, which perches atop a CitizenM hotel, a Rivian store, LEGO’s U.S. headquarters, and more above the eight-lane turnpike, right where Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood becomes Fenway. The sculpture is the sole artwork slated to enliven the site’s plaza, flanked by two tall buildings. The developer opted for this double-pronged layout at the request of locals, who wanted to keep the sunset view that the previous barebones bridge in this spot afforded. It recruited Cambridge and New York-based art curatorial and advisory firm Goodman Taft, however, to sniff out the ideal artist to activate this prime alcove.
Goodman Taft co-founder Abigail Ross Goodman intimated over email that when her team got started on the project three years ago, Pesce was on their shortlist. “This very prominent and public site called for a work of art that could match its spirit, its scale, and its nature as the nexus where many neighborhoods connect and converge,” Goodman Taft senior partner Molly Epstein explained. “Gaetano Pesce reminded us that ‘color is energy, it is happiness, a positive sign,’ and in—a unique variant of the sculpture conceived and designed at a monumental scale by the artist specifically for the site and executed in his signature resin and bold red hue—he gives Boston a new public icon of love, empathy, creativity and connection.”
Gaetano Pesce, (2009). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York, and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz/London.
actually began in 1979 as an idea for a table lamp featuring a bespoke base that would reflect the favorite city of whichever collector commissioned it. When Pesce sketched its prototype, he was drawing from that ubiquitous Valentine’s Day motif where Cupid’s bow pierces a heart. The addition of a second heart doubles his message of connection.
“If you want to be sincere in what you do, you have to use material of your time, because that is the proof you work in the moment,” Pesce once said. Because it’s so recognizable, viewers driving by Lyrik Back Bay won’t have to waste any time decoding the sculpture’s meaning.
Pesce previously turned the lamp into a monument for Paris+ par Art Basel 2022. “This object is significant because it has meaning in a moment when the world is not doing so well,” he told Art Basel at the time. “So many stupid people are in positions of power, and they are doing serious damage. Art and design have a very significant role to play.”
Gaetano Pesce, (2024-25). Lyrik Back Bay, Samuels and Associates, Boston, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Goodman Taft. Photo: Aram Boghosian (AramPhoto). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz / London.
To drive his point home, Pesce made this second, permanent iteration of the work two times taller than its Parisian predecessor. Although he died last spring before bringing the piece to fruition, his estate, his longtime studio staff, and gallery Champ Lacombe, all joined forces to oversee its production at the very fabrication shop that Pesce had selected in Viareggio, Italy. In other words, this sculpture was a labor of love, from beginning to end.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
