Benjamin Pardo and David Gresham are passionate collectors and trained architects and industrial designers with decades of experience in the design industry.
Altogether, Pardo and Gresham’s work and interviews have been featured in over thirty publications including
The New York Times,
Domus, Dwell, Elle Décor, and Architectural Digest.
Pardo was president of the Italian manufacturer Unifor for 17 years before joining Knoll in 2005, where he remained for over 15 years and served as a senior vice president and design director, redefining everything from their global product portfolio to the company’s showrooms and retail architecture. Over the course of his career he has collaborated with and guided the work of Marc Newson, Piero Lissoni, Antonio Citterio and countless others, and curated and renewed the work of Florence Knoll, Mies Van Der Rohe, Harry Bertoia, and George Nakashima, to name but a few. Now, he is a professor of interior architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Pardo’s partner, award-winning designer David Gresham, worked as vice president of design at Fitch, Steelcase, and Wet Design and, since 2011, has run his own design consulting business. Gresham also co-founded Design Logic while a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 1980s, a short-lived but influential company that helped change the design landscape and practices in the United States and abroad. Altogether, Pardo and Gresham’s work and interviews have been featured in over thirty publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, Elle Décor, and Architectural Digest.
Pardo and Gresham’s genuine love of architecture and design and nuanced understanding of how the two co-exist results in a harmonious, layered, visually stimulating collection in which various pieces riff off of one another...
The couple’s considerable experience with design and architecture informs their impeccable ability to combine a variety of modern objects, furniture, and art into what has been described as a cozy, livable form of modernism. They have a particular fondness for Ettore Sottsass’s designs and amassed an impressive array of his ceramics, furniture, and lighting, which they balance with Scandinavian and American modern pieces by Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Hans Wegner, and stark, geometric artworks by Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, and Richard Serra. While such an amalgamation of styles could become dissonant and overwhelming, Pardo and Gresham’s genuine love of architecture and design and nuanced understanding of how the two co-exist results in a harmonious, layered, visually stimulating collection in which various pieces riff off of one another: the black of Kelly’s geometric prints continues in the custom black Wegner valet chair and bench, Judd’s bright, hard-edged rectangles call to the architectonic, equally colorful Sottsass vases and teapots, Calder’s black, white, and red tapestry calls to the similarly hued but stylistically different metal flowers by Gherardo Frassa, and so on.
Pardo remarked in a 2008 interview about his and Gresham’s New York apartment that “you don’t want to look at superfluous things.” This thoughtful approach to building a space is evident in each and every work they acquired.
I want the viewer to mix the colors in his eye. I do not want to mix them on the palette.
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz 1930–2020
Richard Anuszkiewicz was born of humble beginnings in Erie, PA to working class immigrant parents. While attending a local Catholic school, the nuns noticed and encouraged his surprisingly advanced talent for drawing. At the age of 17 he won a National Scholastic Art award and then a full scholarship to the Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio where he would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1953. That same year he won a prestigious Pulitzer travel fellowship. Rather than go to Europe like so many of his contemporaries, he opted to study under Josef Albers at Yale University for his master’s degree.
Albers, a German-born artist and educator, was one of the most influential visual arts teachers of the 20th century and his theory of color and iconic color square paintings had an enormous impact on Anuszkiewicz’s artistic development. After graduating from Yale, Anuszkiewicz returned to Ohio and studied at Kent State University where he earned a teaching degree. It was during this time that he devoted himself more seriously to painting and delved deeper into color theory and optical perception. At first, his paintings found tepid reception, with dealers complaining that his works were nice to look at but difficult on the eyes. This all changed after his solo exhibition at Contemporaries gallery in New York in 1960.
Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, visited the show and purchased one of the artist’s works, showing it at the MoMA later that year alongside other acquisitions. By the following year, Anuszkiewicz had a waiting list for his paintings. His popularity reached its peak in 1965 when his work was featured in MoMA’s seminal The Responsive Eye exhibition focused entirely on Op Art. Time magazine ran a full profile of him and he was anointed by Life magazine as the “new wizard of op”. Anuszkiewicz created visually challenging paintings; unlike his mentor’s work, in which colors harmonize, Anuszkiewicz’s colors purposefully clash with each other and leave an afterimage on the viewer’s retina. During his time at Yale he had become fascinated with perceptual psychology, a subfield of psychology concerned with the conscious and unconscious innate aspects of perception, and the complementary colors and repetitive geometry of his paintings became his outlet to experiment with the concept.
Over the following decades, his work became more mathematical and then architectural; he experimented with gluing thin strips of wood to his canvases, utilized laser-cut aluminum, and even created a series in 2000 made of painted steel. Anuskiewicz continued to paint into the last years of his life, and his work is still widely exhibited and can be found in many private and public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Japan.
Auction Results Richard Anuszkiewicz
3: 29: 33
American Design
11:00 am ct
