Gaetano Di Gregorio

In Milano Salone Satellite, 22-27 April 2009 showed a selection of tableware in ceramic.

In Istanbul I-DECO design and decoration fair, 5-9 March 2009 Gaetano showed a system of mirror “Climbing the mirror” for hanging clothes.
Gaetano’s works are product in Italy by Improntabarre, a ceramic company based in Sicily.

Your own Personal Jesus (Ambiente Messe Frankfurt, Talents, Frankfurt am Main, 2009)
The attempt to re-design the symbols of different religions starts when I realized that the iconography of these themes is often old fashioned and conservative. I started to design a simple cross, emphasizing the outline of the man and simplifying the symbol the more I could. The sense of sufferance disappears giving place to a new light cross in different colours. One remembers ironically the colors of Italian flag, mainland of Catholicism. Your own Personal Jesus is one of 8 products chosen by Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levian for Personal Shopper, Tendence ‘09, Frankfurt am Main.

re-design symbols of religions by Gaetano Di Gregorio

Tulipiere (Salone Satellite, Milano 2008)
The vase for tulips has an organic geometrical shape. You can put only one flower per hole, allowing the leaves display themselves. The blue and white glaze discreetly appears out of the vase mouths, inside and outside change place, playing to invert the common sense. The rough and deeply grey external part preserves the inside beauty, like an inland empire.
Tulipiere is now in the permanent collection of design of the Art Institute of Chicago.

vase detail by Gaetano Di Gregorio

Teapots (Salone Satellite, Milano 2008)
My interest in tea-ware started in China, where I spent some time in a porcelain workshop in Jingdezhen in 2006. Back in Italy, I decided to combine ceramics with soft, handy material to help gripping the pot. In my works I often apply to the combination of soft and hard material. In this case I looked for both a formal and functional solution, wrapping up the teapot body a band or a coat of neoprene, soft felt or silicone, to avoid to burn one’s fingers and to keep tea warm. Bands and coats are heat-resisting and easily removable to wash the teapot. Each part of the teapot is functional to the other. The neoprene band and white ceramic teapot is is now in the permanent collection of design of the Art Institute of Chicago and in the artshop of The Getty Museum, California.

Teapots use

Gaetano Di Gregorio was born in Catania, Italy, in 1972. He has been living in Venice since 1991 where he combines his work as architect with that of ceramist and designer.
His artistic process often links computer graphics and textual elements, that are applied to ceramics. Emphasis is placed on the process, favoring the narrative and serial dimension that dialogue with memory and the environment, and become conveyers of poetic instances, at times a paradox.
In 2006 experimented with porcelain techniques in Jingdezhen, China in Sanbao Institute for Ceramic Art, Residency for artists.
In 2003 he founded Spiazzi (www.spiazzi.info) with other artists, a collective studio and cultural centre of visual arts and design in Venice. Spiazzi promotes Manos, an open air market for auto-producer designers in Venice Rialto fish market.

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