An exhibition that is an apartment: Gamper, “I don’t like white cubes”

Seventeen years mark a crucial period, a lifetime’s journey for anyone, especially for a creative personality. For Martino Gamper, the Italian designer based in London who bridges high-end collecting and the furniture industry, this period is punctuated by two exhibitions: one in 2007, “100 Chairs for 100 Days”, now a landmark, and the other, “Before, After & Beyond” (curated by Martino Gamper and Sarah Douglas), which feels like a culmination. The new show was staged at the London residence of Maja Hoffmann, founder of Luma Arles, to coincide with the Frieze art fair.

“I don’t like exhibiting in white cubes,” Gamper explains, sharing why he chose to take over this 18th-century home in Marylebone to create a fully inhabitable space. Here, the visitor is invited to acclimate and linger within the series of rooms—there’s a card-playing room, a study, a lounge, and a bedroom—as if embracing a temporary feeling of home.

Assemblage and grafting are essential to Gamper's approach, defining this house too: a remix that goes beyond the inventive readymade of 100 Chairs, blending not just various chair parts but a broad array of limited-edition pieces, prototypes, experiments, objets trouvés, and industrially produced items. Together, they coalesce into a uniquely personal and harmonious language.

Questa residenzialità immersiva potrebbe già di per sé costituire un motivo di distinzione: oltre che nei white cube, le mostre di design vengono spesso allestite in luoghi altri o terzi, ma raramente ricostruiscono un senso di domesticità reale e compiuto. Eppure, l’interesse per questa casa totale, dove la personalità del designer si infonde da cima a fondo, va oltre quest’ovvia constatazione.

Upon closer inspection, however, the remix takes a further lateral step, challenging the notion of singular authorship typically associated with the designer-as-creator. Gamper, as already done in the past, seeks an active dialogue with past masters through reinterpretation and appropriation. This approach was exemplified in 2007 with Gio Ponti Translated by Martino Gamper, a collection for Milan’s Nilufar gallery that involved deconstructing and reconfiguring Ponti’s original furnishings from the Parco dei Principi Hotel in Sorrento. Today, this spirit of re-appropriation continues, now engaging pieces by Franco Albini and Paolo Buffa.

Navigating this process of assimilation reveals an important idea: when skillfully executed, bricolage interventions on others’ works can articulate a distinctly personal signature rather than merely echoing past styles. Gamper achieves precisely this — employing an individualized language rich with color and optical patterns, he seamlessly unifies the varied histories of these objects into a cohesive synthesis.