What Martino Gamper did between two thousand and Saturday 04th February 2012

Profusion
19 Jun – 11 Jul 2010
Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, UK

Curated by Sotiris Kyriacou and John Plowman

Anna Barham, Karla Black, Marcel Broodthaers, Lucy Clout, Clem Crosby, Jimmie Durham, Mark Fairnington, Doug Fishbone, Martino Gamper, Roger Hiorns, John Plowman, Daniel Silver, Harald Smykla, Jack Strange

Beacon Art Project presents ‘Profusion’, an exhibition inspired by the unique setting of Calke Abbey, a National Trust property in Derbyshire. Hidden away in a hollow within an ancient deer park, Calke’s interiors and outbuildings are filled with the accumulation of years of collecting and hoarding by its eccentric and reclusive owners. Containing a diverse selection of household objects, artefacts, precious heirlooms and collections of natural history, Calke is now preserved in a state of atmospheric decline, as it was found when the Trust took it over in 1985.

‘Profusion’ presents especially commissioned and existing works by twelve acclaimed international artists, exploring themes and ideas pivotal to the exhibition’s context.

Calke’s rambling contents declare their fragility and materiality, emphasising a heightened sense of physicality and entropy. The house is purposely presented in a way that disregards established hierarchies, taxonomies and methods of display, celebrating instead the glorious disarray of a rich diversity of objects and artefacts and their testimony to the passage of time.

Calke emphasises multiple viewpoints and possibilities within a framework of interconnectedness. It embraces the tentativeness of imposed categories, highlighting their relativity and debunking presumptions regarding the containment and representation of knowledge.
taken from the press release

Beacon Art Project

Get It Louder, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou
British Council, London
May - Jun 2010

Get It Louder was an international exhibition organised by leading Chinese curator Ou Ning. The first edition in 2005 was the most substantial showing ever of contemporary Chinese design in China. For the 2007 sequel Ou Ning invited the British Council and Newbetter to co-curate a collection of British work.

Emily Campbell, former director of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council together with Shumon Basar and Joshua Bolchover curated the UK representation which included 14 artists and designers whose work had not previously been seen in China - Åbäke, Danny Brown, Marloes Ten Bhomer, Sam Buston, Shezad Dawood, Neil Rock, Julia Lohmann, Simon Heijdens, Celine Condorelli, Assa Ashuach, D-Fuse and Troika.

Get It Louder opened at the Grandview Mall in Guangzhou and toured to Shanghai and Beijing. During the three month tour the exhibition attracted over 175,000 visitors.
taken from the press release

British Council
Images © Matylda Krzykowski

Arne Split
2007
Found wooden and metal chair elements
A fake Arne Jacobsen 3107 chairs mixed with another chair found in a furniture warehouse.

Chinoise Trouvé
2007
Found wooden chair elements
This chair uses a copy of a Chinese antique stool as found in many shopping malls around the world.

Huang Chair
2007
Found rattan and metal chair elements
A rattan chair on the base of a typical Chinese school chair base.

Learning While Performing, Performing While Learning
Z33, Hasselt, Belgium
28 May - 30 May 2010

Within the framework of Design by Performance Martino Gamper develops the performance Learning While Performing, Performing While Learning.

From Friday 28 May to Sunday 30 May a performance by designer Martino Gamper (ITA) takes place at Z33 in Hasselt (Belgium). In this performance Gamper will take on the role of an apprentice in a woodturning studio.

Under the professional guidance of the Flemish Woodturning Guild he will submerge himself in this traditional technique. The learning process will be put up as an act, in which the transmission of knowledge is central. The origin of woodturning dates to around 1300BC when the Egyptians first developed the necessary tools for this. The technique has been around for ages and has been perfected by many important civilizations. During this performance he will try his luck at this age-old traditional custom.

Gamper’s practice derives from an abiding interest in the psycho-social aspects of design. Curiosity is also an important aspect of Gamper’s work (100 chairs in 100 days, furniture while you wait, …), as is also the case with Learning While Performing, Performing While Learning.

The performance will be held during the last weekend of the exhibition “Design by Performance”. This exhibition focuses on the increase of performance and performativity in design. Gamper developed this performance especially for Z33 to match with this exhibition.

The performance by Martino Gamper will also coincide with the last day of Borderline, the Cumulus Conference Belgium (May 26-29). This conference wishes to explore and experience the various facets of borderlines and how limits and limitations are overcome. Cumulus is the international association of universities and colleges of art, design and media.

taken from the press release

Z33
Images © Matylda Krzykowski

Stanze e Camere + 100 Chairs in 100 Days
6 Oct – 8 Nov 2009
Triennale Design Museum, Milano, Italy
In Collaboration with Gallery Nilufar
Curated by Silvana Annicchiarico

This project, as Gamper himself observes, grew out of the ideas generated by a viewing of Lars von Trier’s movie Dogville, where a whole town is represented only by the white outlines of the houses.

Gamper likewise started from the outlines. He drew the floor, studied the positions of the rooms and then tried to imagine a house made up of new elements combined with others he had already made for earlier projects, a logic of design based on rethinking and repositioning, so offering the various objects reused a sort of “new destiny.”

The principal room, the most convivial one, is the living room. Gamper represented it with a House Plan carpet handmade in Nepal.
The plan of an apartment of 30 m2 is designed on this carpet, as if to suggest a leap in scale and social context: a carpet that represents a living room is at the same time a house, its layout based on a typical Milanese apartment of the seventies.

On the carpet in the living room, Gamper positioned the Off Cuts table, made for his Total Trattoria project. Then he created a revisitation of the large Arcco floor lamp by the Castiglioni brothers, replacing the original marble base with a stool for formwork filled with concrete. As a lampshade he used the same plastic stool, which can be moved to regulate the light. In this way the light starts from a stool and ends up in a stool, transferring a known element to the domestic scale as the architectural matrix.

The bedroom rests on a light-colored fitted carpet. Inside it are a box belonging from the Gio Ponti Translated by Martino Gamper project, some chairs, a lamp from Gamper’s work on Mollino and a bed made specially for the project out of elements of Franco Albino’s LB7 bookcase from 1956.

The kitchen has a wooden floor, industrial parquet, cut out and recomposed as a sort of mosaic measuring 7 x 2 m. On it stands a table made for the Total Trattoria project, but with the top in wood mosaic resting on trestles whose hooks are varnished with glass paste, a traditional technique.

The office, finally, rests on Moroccan nomad carpets, united by a graphic pattern. Inside it there is an Off Cuts table with various types of white formica, a Together bookcase, a chair on casters, and a cabinet made of parchment.

In its overall layout, Stanze e camere appears an example of action design, in which the performative element (the gesture of recreating, repositioning, combining and recontextualizing) predominates over the more abstract design component, and the project appears more a developing process than an immutable and definitive result.
text by Silvana Annicchiarico

See more images here

www.triennale.it
www.triennaledesignmuseum.it

Autoprogettazione Revisited: Easy-to-assemble Furniture Enzo Mari and invited guests
03 - 27 Oct 2009
Architectural Association, London

Autoprogettazione Revisted is a group exhibition that traces the influence of renowned Italian designer Enzo Mari’s 1970’s project for self-made furniture. Using the AA Gallery as a project space, nine artists and designers were commissioned to respond to Mari’s instruction-based furniture plans with their own set of instructions.

For Mari, the quality and integrity of a piece of work is determined when the shape of an object does not ‘seem’ but simply ‘is’. In a text accompanying the instructions, he writes that ‘anyone, apart from factories and traders, can use the designs to make them by themselves’. Seen originally by Mari as a means for the self-fabrication of quality design objects, Autoprogettazione continues today as an expression of open source and collaborative design thinking made topical by a recent proliferation of digital technologies.

Invited artists/designers: Phyllida Barlow; Broussard/Seilles; Martino Gamper; Graham Hudson; Keung Caputo; Lucas Maassen; Joe Pipal

With thanks to: The studio of Enzo Mari; Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Parma; and the Triennale Design Museum, Milano.
taken from the press release

www.aaschool.ac.uk

db Sedia
2009
Mountain Pine

London Design Festival
19 Sep - 27 Sep 2009
V & A Museum, London

We felt Britain deserved a pat on the back this year for services to design, which have surged of late, both in interest and success on a global scale, so we set about commissioning one of London’s most exciting resident designers (well versed in the art of chairs) to build an arch using chairs from one of Britain’s most historic manufacturers. Martino Gamper was the man, Ercol the manufacturer and together, with construction expertise from engineers Atelier One, the contemporary arch took shape.
Taken from the press release
In collaboration with Wallpaper* Magazine, Ercol and Atelier One
taken from the press release

Images ©Anthony Dickenson (www.stemagency.com)

Super Contemporary
3 Jun – 4 Oct 2009
Design Museum, London

Design Museum has joined forces with Beefeater 24 to celebrate the fearlessly progressive spirit of London’s greatest creative minds, past and present. The exhibition was designed by Martino Gamper and graphic design consultancy Bibliothèque, and guest-curated by Daniel Charny.
taken from the press release

www.designmuseum.org

Beyond Kiosk - Modes of Multiplication
15 Mar – 13 Sep 2009
Mudam, Luxembourg
Curated by Christoph Keller
Exhibition design by Martino Gamper

This on-going project, initiated by German publisher and designer Christoph Keller, who founded the publishing company Revolver, is a travelling exhibition focusing on independent publishing in the fields of contemporary art, design and graphic design. It’s starting point is Kiosk, an expending archive, which gathers today over 6.000 publications – artists’ books, catalogues, magazines, videos, audio works – and which travelled to more than twenty institutions all over the world since 2001, including the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Witte de With in Rotterdam, ICA in London and Artists’ Space in New York City. Beyond Kiosk has been thought of as a curated selection from this archive, aiming at showcasing the most relevant examples of independent publishing in contemporary art. It gathers around 700 publications from 250 publishers as varied as Book Works, Dot Dot Dot, Vier5, Printed Matter Inc. and Zédélé Éditions. For each presentation of Beyond Kiosk, a designer or artist is commissioned to develop a new display for the exhibition. Mudam has invited English designer Martino Gamper, whose recent project 100 Chairs in 100 Days at the London Design Museum in 2007, as well as his participation at Manifesta 7 in 2008, attracted a lot of attention, to imagine the exhibition design.
taken from the press release

© Photo: Andres Lejona

SuperStories
2nd Triennial of contemporary art, fashion and design
Feb - May 2009
Hasselt, Belgium

The Hasselt Triennial is a dynamic art project for contemporary arts, fashion and design, and all possible relations between them.
The Triennial takes place in the city of Hasselt. The whole city becomes the stage but the culture houses serve as the central locations.
The project has international ambitions and addresses Flanders, the Euregion and international art and culture lovers. At set times, the Triennial project focuses on the interaction and the confrontation between art and applied arts, how they influence and feed each other and whether it is sense or nonsense to consider them as separate worlds. The confrontation or the connection between both worlds is the starting point for a range of exhibitions and will be expounded through an elaborate educational programme with lectures and workshops and in a catalogue. Through its high-quality and diverse mix of contemporary visual arts and applied arts (fashion & design), the Triennial presents a platform for both young and upcoming regional artists and big names from the national and international art, fashion and design world.
taken from the press release

www.superstories.be

Nowhere/ Now/ Here
LABoral Centro de Arte
Gijon, Spain
09 October 2008 - 20 April 2009

Four Seater Empty Chairs
2008
Four Seater Empty Chairs are pieces that explore the negative space, in this case that of a chair. Martino Gamper wanted to create a chair where one would use the inside void of a seat. it can be used in two directions: as a chair and in combination as a desk.
The work was initially conceived in 2004 for an exhibition called Furniture I’ve Always Wanted to Make at the M + R gallery in east London.

LABoral Centro de Arte shows Nowhere/Now/Here, an exhibition curated by the creative partnership of Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado (El Último Grito) that challenges the perception of design by questioning our relationship with the environment. Taking the viewpoint that our environment has become part of us rather than us being part of it, as its point of departure, Nowhere/Now/ Here encourages us to see design as an integral component of the world-shaping process.

CURATORS: Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado (El Último Grito)

ARTISTS: 5:5 Designers, AA, Amidov, Assa Ashuach, Bruce Bell, Bryony Birkbeck, Tord Boontje, Marta Botas & Germán R. Blanco, David Bowen, Fernando Brizio, Nacho Carbonell, Daniel Charny & Gabriel Klasmer, Santiago Cirugeda, Carl Clerkin, Paul Cocksedge, Dainippon Type Organization, Óscar Díaz, Dunne & Raby, Daniel Eatock, Olivia Flore Decaris, Tiago Fonseca, Fulguro & Thomas Jomini, Architecture Workshop, Martino Gamper, Martí Guixé, Mathias Hahn, Interaction Research Studio, Onkar Kular, Tithi Kutchamuch, Dash MacDonald, Material Beliefs (Auger-Loizeau, Elio Caccavale, Tobie Kerridge, Susana Soares, Aleksandar Zivanovic, David Muth), Alejandro Mazuelas, Alon Meron, mmmm…, Eelko Moorer, Oscar Narud, NB: Studio, Ernesto Oroza, Marc Owens, Pedrita, Laura Potter, Corinne Quin, Random International, Raw Edges Design Studio, Nic Rysenbry, Jerszy Seymour, Bert Simons, Studio Glithero, Yuri Suzuki, Gregor Timlin, Noam Toran, Manel Torres, Maud Traon, Troika, Pablo Valbuena, Greetje van Helmond, Dominic Wilcox, Nick Williamson, Marei Wollersberger, Zaunka

More info about the show here