Renowned for creating objects that celebrate the joy and beauty of everyday things, Italian designer Martino Gamper has reimagined Objectspace as a social space for encounter and interaction.
Across a new body of furniture focused on chairs and tables, visitors to the gallery are invited to use the space to dwell, meet or play. As well as hosting a busy schedule of events within the exhibition, including live performance, talks and workshops, Objectspace and Gamper invite the public to book the gallery, for free, for their own use – be it for a rehearsal, family gathering or public meeting. Taking the form of a common space, the spatial layout of the exhibition changes over time, altered by the visitors who use it and shape the furniture into their own configurations.
Gamper’s new body of work was produced using a timber he designed in collaboration with Italian company ALPI. The material is made from the waste stream of industrial veneer production through a process of dyeing, laminating and compressing. This gives form to a new type of human-made timber – a reimagined material that possesses a language of grain and colour not found in naturally grown timbers.
Accompanying Endgrained is Wood from the trees, the result of a collaborative research project by Gamper, Objectspace and designers James Goggin and Shan James of Practise. Wood from the trees offers an ephemeral archive of timber histories in Aotearoa, drawn from a rich range of sources including journals, magazines, photographic collections and timber museums. The content explores the life of the tree, centring on the transformative moment of wood becoming timber as it is taken from its ecological context and placed in human hands.
At heart, the two projects express Gamper’s enduring love of timber and honour the decades he has spent working with this material that is as old as time.
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Martino Gamper OBE (b. 1971, Merano, Italy) lives and works in London. Starting as an apprentice with a furniture maker in Merano, Gamper went on to study sculpture under Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He completed a master’s in 2000 from the Royal College of Art, London, where he studied under Ron Arad.
Working across design and art venues, Martino Gamper engages in a variety of projects including exhibition design, interior design, one-off commissions and the design of mass-produced products for the cutting edge of the international furniture industry.
He is internationally recognised for his groundbreaking 2006 work 100 Chairs in 100 Days, which saw him systematically collect discarded chairs then spend 100 days reconfiguring the design of each one in an attempt to transform its character and/or function. Gamper’s practice challenges boundaries between design and visual arts – he is committed to finding new ways to engage with and activate design within our everyday lives.
Gamper was awarded an OBE in 2023 for services to design. He was the recipient of the Moroso Award for Contemporary Art in 2011, and the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year, Furniture Award in 2008 for 100 Chairs in 100 Days. He is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Michael Lett.
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This project is made possible with support from Objectspace Strategic Partner ECC and Exhibition Patrons Tony Kerridge and Micheal Do, with accompanying public programmes supported by the British Council New Zealand and the Pacific.
