NEW YORK, NY.- Gaetano Pesce, who for more than 60 years created eccentrically shaped, brightly colored furniture, art objects and, occasionally, buildings, remaining the enfant terrible of the design world even as he became its grand old man, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 84.

The death, at a hospital, was caused by a stroke, his daughter Milena Pesce said.

Gaetano Pesce, who was born in Italy but spent much of his life in New York City, may be best known for his translucent, brilliantly colored objects, including bowls, vases and trays, which he made by pouring resin into molds, then adding dyes that he chose on the spot. Other pieces, including tables, chairs and lamps, were made of hard plastic, also with vibrant pigments added extemporaneously.

“Gaetano introduced the idea of mass customization,” said Murray Moss, who featured Pesce’s work at his lower Manhattan design store, Moss, for nearly 20 years.

Of Pesce’s factory-made pieces, the most celebrated is an armchair shaped like a buxom fertility goddess attached by a wire to a spherical ottoman.

Pesce explained that, with its suggestion of a ball and chain, what was variously referred to as La Mamma, Big Mama, Donna, and the Up chair portrayed the subjugation of women. It was, he said, “an image of non-freedom.”

Indeed, if his work appeared whimsical, it was also meant to be political. Unlike other modes of communication, Pesce said, a chair can bring a political statement right into the home.

His main political message was that conformity was stifling — or as he put it in a 2019 talk at Columbia University: “Repetition in life is a disaster. Order is totalitarian.”

Not surprisingly, he eschewed right angles.

“He felt the framing of something at exactly 90 degrees — that was absolutely dehumanizing,” Moss said. “He was an enemy of the grid.”

So much so that for a 1975 show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Pesce presented models of grid-like buildings by architect Mies van der Rohe made out of raw meat. When the meat began to rot, the show had to be shut down.

“I wanted to show that people can decompose when they live in a certain kind of space,” Pesce said.

In 2022, he was asked to exhibit his work at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado. “I won’t do it in a prison,” Pesce said he told the museum, referring to the wooden grid, by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, that covers its building. Instead, he designed, as an installation that hid the grid for the run of the show, an inflatable facade depicting the sun setting over mountains.

In a 2019 essay about Pesce, critic and curator Glenn Adamson wrote that “instead of rationalism, he offers wild disruptive energy, provocation.”

“He posits wholly new ways of living just to see what that might look like,” he continued. “He bores easily.”

Pesce seemed to become more productive with age. In the early 2000s, he moved his studio from SoHo to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to make room for up to eight full-time assistants. In 2016, he affiliated with the prestigious gallery Salon 94 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

For an exhibition there in 2019, Pesce and his crew made chairs in front of visitors. Having an audience was nothing new for him; he had ventured into performance art in the 1960s. In one well-known performance, he promised that anyone who came to the event would receive a portrait — then passed around a mirror.

He was a favorite of design curators. The Museum of Modern Art in New York began showing his work in 1970 and has included it in at least 17 exhibitions. Its collection includes such items as his Moloch floor lamp — an ordinary swing-arm desk lamp blown up to gargantuan proportions.

Late in his career, Pesce was the subject of retrospectives and celebrations at several of the world’s leading museums. “The establishment was celebrating him because he was anti-establishment,” said Moss, and that had made for “an awkward situation for Gaetano.”

Gaetano Pesce was born Nov. 8, 1939, in La Spezia, on the northwest coast of Italy. His father, Vittorio, a naval officer, died in World War II, leaving Gaetano’s mother, Alda, a trained concert pianist, to raise him and his older brother and sister with the help of relatives in Padua and Florence.

“Conversations about music and art helped us to survive,” Pesce told author Marisa Bartolucci.

He studied architecture at the University of Venice but audited classes at the more progressive Venice College of Industrial Design. Eager to find new materials, he wrote to chemical companies to ask if he could come visit. Two companies said yes. During the visits, he learned about new kinds of plastics that he soon incorporated into his designs.

In 1964, furniture magnate Cesare Cassina gave the young Pesce a monthly stipend to continue his research. He soon designed a series of foam chairs and ottomans that could be shipped flat once the air was vacuumed out of them. The most popular piece in what he named the Up series was the ball-and-chain ensemble (the chain in Pesce’s drawings became a cord when production began). It has been produced by B&B Italia, a company founded in part by Cassina, since 1969.

For years Pesce maintained a studio in Paris and taught in Strasbourg, France. After he was hired to teach design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1980, he moved with his family to New York. There, he created a sofa based on the New York skyline and a sunset, symbolizing what he saw at the time as the city’s decline.

But he often said that his initial impression of New York was wrong, and that he loved the city. His entry in the 2002 World Trade Center memorial competition called for recreating the twin towers with a giant, three-dimensional red heart hanging from their upper floors.

He also designed interiors, including, famously, offices for the Chiat/Day advertising agency in Manhattan (in 1994), a surreal landscape that, as Herbert Muschamp wrote in The New York Times Magazine that year, “appears suspended in a dream state: tables sprout faces, chairs chime, the floor erupts in a free association of icons — arrows, animals, eyes, logos, light bulbs — and painted captions.”

Muschamp called it “a remarkable work of art” reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí.

“Where a conventional design seeks to satisfy the desire for beauty,” he concluded, “Pesce uncovers something closer to the beauty of desire.”

Chiat/Day’s and several other of Pesce’s interiors have been dismantled over time, their parts turning up at auction. That disturbed design historians, who said the pieces were most meaningful in context.

Pesce also designed buildings, including an office block in Osaka, Japan, covered in plants; a vacation house in Bahia, Brazil; and two separate playful “holiday houses” in Puglia, Italy, for a married couple. (He made them from polyurethane, one pink, one blue.) Why two? “To stay together with someone is boring,” he explained during the Columbia lecture.

Pesce’s first marriage, to Milena Vettore, when he was in his late 20s, ended with her death about a year later. In the early 1980s, he married Francesca Lucco, who died in 1997.

In addition to his daughter Milena, from his second marriage, he is survived by a son, Jacopo, also from that marriage; a daughter from another relationship, Fontessa Duncan Pesce; a brother, Claudio; and a companion, Ruth Shuman. He lived on the Upper East Side for decades.

The seemingly endless variety of Gaetano Pesce’s works wasn’t accidental. “I believe that the treasure of the world is diversity,” he told the Times style magazine T in 2022. “If we are the same, we cannot talk, because there is nothing to say. But if you and I are different, there’s a lot to exchange.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.