This 2025 season, PDA Gallery will dedicate its showroom to the work of iconic Japanese designers Shigeru Uchida and Shiro Kuramata. PDA will also illuminate the Hotel Il Palazzo, where East met West in perhaps the pinnacle moment of postmodern design.

As our January feature, PDA Gallery is proud to present ”Harmony” the largest known assemblage in North America to date of works by the late Japanese designer Shigeru Uchida.

PDA Gallery, renowned innovators in the world of art and design, unveils its seasonal program. Leading with the deeply underappreciated work of Shigeru Uchida. A prolific designer and major figure of post-war Japan, Uchida (1943-2016) left his mark on his era with resolutely elegant design, at once rooted in a reflection on Japanese aesthetics while incorporating the cutting edge of the west. Reflecting on the ways in which space is occupied in Japan, Uchida’s ideal is “transparent, lightweight furniture with a minimal sense of gravity, which transcends physical presence.” 

Born in 1943 in Yokohama, Uchida graduated from the Kuwasawa Design School in 1966, eventually becoming its director. He founded Studio 80 in 1981, and quickly became a leading designer of his time. His work covers not only commercial and residential interior design, but furniture, industrial design and urban planning. He designed interiors for the Yohji Yamamoto boutiques, the Kobe Fashion Museum and the Hotel Il Palazzo in Fukuoka, among others. His furniture works are held at the Metropolitan Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Shigeru Uchida was at the heart of a network of important friendships in Japan with designer Shiro Kuramata and fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, and in the West with architects and designers Ettore Sottsass, Aldo Rossi, and Gaetano Pesce. As such, he played a major role in postmodernism in design that has not received the illumination it deserves.

It is our pleasure at PDA to give him light.