Peter Shire

Peter Shire (1947-) is an American designer and ceramist, a respected exponent of the Californian funk style. This style, which became popular in the late 1960s, placed the emphasis on bright colours and the use of unconventional shapes and presented many points of contact with the avant-garde of Anti-Design that was simultaneously gaining popularity in Europe. It is precisely thanks to these references that Shire, after having achieved good fame in California in the 1970s with his artistic ceramics, managed to achieve international fame in the 1980s: he was in fact noticed by the great Italian master Ettore Sottsass who saw in Shire's work some analogies with his own style and invited him to design furniture for the Memphis movement, which he launched in 1981. The furniture designed by Shire for Memphis took his creativity to another level of scale and is characterised by asymmetrical and irregular geometries, enriched by bright and cheerful colours. Even more famous are his “impossible teapots”, a type of object that has always fascinated him and that recurs several times throughout his career, reinterpreted in new and increasingly daring forms. A major player on the Los Angeles cultural scene, he has created numerous sculptures hosted in public places in the city and was part of the team that worked on the graphic image of the 1984 Olympics.