A constellation of figures shaping the Sweeterfat philosophy

GAETANO PESCE

1939–2024

Gaetano Pesce is a continuous thread throughout all of Sweeterfat’s projects. There is no other designer whose work we have identified so strongly with.

We often say it feels as though Pesce imbued each piece with a tiny spirit that reaches a hand out and invites us to decide whether we wish to take it.

CONSTANTIN & LAURENE BOYM

Sweeterfat represents Boym Partners for ongoing curatorial projects in addition to new releases.

For decades, Constantin and Laurene Boym have created conceptual works influenced by a readymade practice that focuses on the American vernacular.

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NICOLA L.

1932-2018

The radical, interdisciplinary artist whose practice spanned performance, film, painting, and design. Her focus on women’s bodies as a site of politics and metaphor meant that her pieces - sometimes overt and other times subtle - used the body as an object to confront how it is objectified.

WENDELL CASTLE

1932-2018

Wendell Castle treated furniture as sculpture, pushing wood into forms that traditional furniture making had rarely allowed. His pioneering experiments with stack-laminated wood resulted in strange, expressive, and often biomorphic objects that helped collapse the divide between furniture, craft, and fine art.

LAPO BINAZZI

b.1943

Few designers embody the unruliness of Italian Radical Design quite like Lapo Binazzi. Through UFO, the group he co-founded in Florence, architecture could become a performance, an inflatable, a lamp, or a political intervention. Binazzi used humor and provocation as tools for questioning good taste and the idea of what a designer was supposed to make.

PIERRE JEANNERET

1896-1967

Architecture and furniture were inseparable parts of Pierre Jeanneret’s practice. This is perhaps clearest in Chandigarh, where he developed furniture from local materials and straightforward construction - objects designed not in isolation, but specifically to serve the education, medicine, and institutions within post-independence India.

ALVAR AALTO

1898-1976

For Alvar Aalto, modernism did not have to mean coldness or rigid geometry. Using bent plywood and an attentiveness to the human body, Aalto gave his architecture and furniture a warmth that became distinctly his own, offering a more organic vision of modern life.

NANDA VIGO

1936-2020

For Nanda Vigo, light was a material in its own right. Moving freely between art, architecture, interiors, and design, she used mirrors, glass, neon, and reflective surfaces to distort our perception of space and create environments that seemed to extend beyond their physical limits. Her work belonged as much to the experimental art world around ZERO group and Lucio Fontana as it did to Italian design.

ROGER TALLON

1929-2011

Trains, televisions, cameras, machinery, furniture, and tableware - Roger Tallon designed across a wide range of scales and applications. In each instance, new aesthetics emerge.

SHIRO KURAMATA

1934-1991

Shiro Kuramata made solid objects feel as though they might disappear. Glass, transparent acrylic, and other materials allowed him to play with weight and perception, producing furniture and interiors that could feel simultaneously functional and almost immaterial.

ROBERT VENTURI & DENISE SCOTT BROWN

1925-2018 (Venturi)
b.1931 (Scott Brown)

Instead of rejecting the billboards, casinos, storefronts, signs, and historical references of the everyday city, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took them seriously. Their architecture and writing challenged the purity of modernism and made a case for contradiction, symbolism, popular taste, and the messy visual language already surrounding us.

ALESSANDRO GUERRIERO

b.1943

With Studio Alchimia, which he founded in Milan in 1976, Alessandro Guerriero helped open design to decoration, irony, and radical experimentation. Objects did not need to belong to a coherent style or even solve a conventional problem. Instead, they could communicate an idea, tell a story, or simply provoke a reaction.

VICO MAGISTRETTI

1920-2006

Vico Magistretti worked closely with Italian manufacturers to reduce furniture and lighting to clear gestures and clever construction, producing objects that could be experimental without sacrificing their usefulness or suitability for mass production. Today, his designs epitomize the space age modernism of the 1960s and 1970s.

OLIVIER MOURGUE

b.1939

Olivier Mourgue imagined furniture around the body rather than the room. Working with newly available foams and stretch fabrics, he created low, fluid forms that encouraged people to sit more informally. His furniture captured a moment when design was beginning to rethink not just what an object could look like, but how we might live with it differently too.

ENZO MARI

1932-2020

Enzo Mari was an Italian artist and designer whose practice encompassed an unusually diverse range of systems, imagery, objects, and aesthetics. Underlying this lifetime of work was a persistent investigation into how and why things are made, using design as a tool to question production, labor, authorship, and the relationship between an object and its user.

CINI BOERI

1924-2020

Cini Boeri designed around people: how they sit, move, gather, and live together. Across architecture and furniture, she experimented with flexible forms and unconventional materials to give users greater freedom over how an object or space could be inhabited. The result was work that could be rigorous and highly functional without ever dictating a single way to live.