Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “Designers suffer from constantly having to make new work,” says London-based Italian designer Martino Gamper. With warehouses full of his characterful furniture from the last two decades, he thought: “Why am I obsessively trying to create new work? Why not bring it all together and generate new connections?” Gamper gained widespread recognition in 2007 for his award-winning project 100 Chairs in 100 Days, in which he transformed an assortment of reclaimed chairs over 100 days in 100 inventive ways. The results at times belie practicality or expectation, with many chairs spliced together or combined with objects to create strange hybrids. First exhibited in London, the project has seen numerous editions around the world. Despite having designed hundreds of different chairs over his career, Gamper continues to find the object a vehicle for creative exploration: “There are as many chairs as characters in the world, as people,” he says. Gamper is internationally celebrated for his playful approach to furniture, which embraces idiosyncratic assemblages, repurposed materials and joyful expression. He set up his own studio in 2000 after studying under British-Israeli industrial designer Ron Arad and was awarded an OBE in 2023 for services to design. A retrospective, for Gamper, provides an opportunity both to take stock — tracing his work’s eclectic evolution — and look ahead. But in planning the exhibition, which is curated in collaboration with Sarah Douglas, he knew a white cube-esque gallery space wouldn’t work. “I find it very difficult to show in white cubes — I’m not a big fan. For me, context is important. So when we started talking about this idea of an exhibition that was looking backwards — and forwards — I really was imagining an interesting house with a character.” He seems to have found it. To coincide with London’s Frieze art fair this October, Gamper has taken over two floors in a grand, 18th-century Marylebone town house — owned by art collector Maja Hoffmann, and adjacent to her private home — to fill it with his works. The exhibition, Before, After & Beyond, is staged like a house, leading from an entrance hall to a games room and office before ascending a sweeping staircase to a high-ceilinged living room and bedroom. Each room has its own character, bringing together works that Gamper says have never been shown all together. In the exhibition, Gamper wants visitors to be able to interact as if they really are guests in someone’s home: to come together around a table and meet new people, to sit and read in a chair. “It’s less of a showing,” he says, “and more of an engaging, an inhabiting.” Are there rules for what people can and can’t do in the space? “I hope people behave like they would if they are in the house of a friend,” he says.The house itself is striking, designed by the Adam brothers in the 1770s, along with the rest of the terrace. And its history is illustrious: once home to the pianist Charles Hallé, politician and brewer Samuel Whitbread, Royal Navy officer John Lindsay, women’s ice hockey pioneer Lady Isobel Gathorne-Hardy, and chancellor of the exchequer Thomas Spring Rice. “When I acquired it, I envisioned it as a versatile space for creative projects, events and collaborations,” says Hoffmann. She often hosts events there for her non-profit Luma Foundation, dedicated to supporting the contemporary arts. “I’ve always seen it as a place where ideas can take shape.”Hoffmann is a longtime admirer of Gamper; not only does she own pieces by him, but he was also invited for a residency at Atelier Luma in Arles. When she heard that Gamper was looking for a domestic space to host an exhibition, she immediately offered the house. Gamper remembers the “wow” feeling of walking into its formal rooms and knowing he had found the right space. In addition to the neoclassical architecture, the rooms are animated by site-specific Rudolf Stingel artworks: a gilded ceiling and a carpet printed with the enlarged red patterns of an antique Ottoman rug. “The whole space radiated through that strong art piece,” says Gamper. His works are an explosion of pattern and colour in themselves — the house’s artworks add to the dynamic melee. “I’ve been trying to imagine how, as a new occupier or tenant of this house, I would live here,” he says. “I just try to imagine a contemporary take on a house that was built 250 years ago.” Part of this reimagining was considering how the ways in which we live have evolved over the centuries. “How we use space is very different now; less formal. Spaces have become more polyfunctional.” The staging of his work in the exhibition invites a playful interpretation of how we interact with domestic environments.Key to his approach is recontextualisation. Gamper reworks other people’s designs — the exhibition features characterful pieces made from deconstructed red chairs by the 20th-century Italian architect Carlo Mollino — but through this show, Gamper is also reinterpreting his own designs, giving them new context and thus, he hopes, new meaning.It’s less of a showing, and more of an engaging, an inhabiting. I hope people behave like they would if they are in the house of a friendBut what does home mean to Gamper? The designer grew up in Merano, a town in the Italian Alps. He remembers jumping on the armchairs in the sitting room as a child, creating a cosy space for himself in a small bedroom, and coming together with the family around the table. “The table was always a very important part,” he says. “We had three meals together every day.” Gamper now lives in London, but that social, unifying role of the table has endured throughout his life and career — it’s all about “spending time together and eating together”. Large tables make an impression in this exhibition. Gamper has also started to embrace the lazier side of furniture: “Until maybe 15 years ago, when I got married to Francis [Upritchard, the artist], I didn’t ever really have a sofa. And I think that’s something I rediscovered over the past few years: this idea of slowing down a bit and having time to read and contemplate.”Could the show be seen as Gamper’s ideal home? He laughs, saying that a home would have to feature work other than his own, but confirms the spirit of the exhibition reflects his domestic preferences: “a mix of styles and textures — a patchwork,” he says. “Each one of the pieces has got detail and character. We don’t have to live in mono, minimal spaces.” There is something deeply personal at play too. “It’s an attempt to have this work together in order to move forward,” he says. “I have to put it all together, sit down, spend these three weeks in a space with people contemplating, and then move on somehow.” So, I suggest, it’s simply one big therapy session? He laughs. “Yes, that’s good.”‘Before, After & Beyond’ runs from October 7 to 26 at 11 Mansfield Street, London W1Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
