‘People always say: “Why make another chair?” To me, that’s like asking why we need another book or another song,’ says Martino Gamper. It’s a Tuesday evening. I’m talking with the designer in his studio in Hackney, east London. The studied calmness – shelves of books, classical music gently playing in the background – belies a hive of activity. As I arrive, I find Gamper, dressed for the muggy British summer in linen trousers and sandals, reviewing the details of a drawing. An electric saw whirs from the adjoining workshop. ‘I don’t think another chair answers anything or makes a better world, necessarily,’ Gamper continues. ‘But it keeps us talking about the world we live in.’
The meaning of a chair – and what happens in the space around it – is something that Gamper has spent his career considering. The designer is preparing for the launch of his latest exhibition project, Sitzung (2023), at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. With this site-specific installation, the museum will be reconfigured as a ‘constantly evolving space’ for public encounters and meetings over the course of eight months.
Starting with a group of 50 chairs, Haus der Kunst’s Mittelhalle – a normally transitory, central space with soaring ceilings and red marble pillars – will see an injection of new seats every other month, up to a total of 300. Although museum staff and the public are free to rearrange the seats however they choose, Gamper himself will change the layout at the start of each week. It’s an experiment in both precise orchestration and serendipity.
Sitting at a table composed of kaleidoscopic wooden shards in mauve, lilac, and blue, I ask Gamper about the work’s title. Meaning both ‘meeting’ and ‘sitting’ in German, Sitzung has an intriguing doubleness, implying an action that could be either solitary or communal, formal or informal. ‘I like this idea that sitting down makes you relax and gather your thoughts,’ he says. ‘It’s very difficult to stand up and read or think about certain things. I’m using the chairs as stand-ins for humans, seeing how people gather in a space. Do they form a circle, a triangle? What kind of hierarchy or chaos ensues?’
Gamper found international acclaim with his 2007 installation 100 Chairs in 100 Days. Creating a new chair every day by combining parts from existing chairs, he challenged standard design-world orthodoxies of neatness and polished ‘good taste’. Furthermore, by giving new life to abandoned objects, Gamper questioned what’s discarded or overlooked, and why. Does he have an imagined sitter in mind, I ask? ‘I don’t think about the individual, but I think about how different we are as humans: what we do, how our bodies move. It’s quite amazing when you observe a large group of people,’ he explains. ‘There’s no “normal”.’
For Sitzung, the parts are created rather than assembled. The chairs are made from sheets of wood veneer produced by the Italian company Alpi. Different layers are glued together slightly unevenly, causing colors to appear in unique combinations when the wood is sliced. Inside the workshop, Gamper shows me an example of the offcuts from the leftover veneer blocks he uses to make his own plywood. ‘Each part can be swapped. It’s a pretty easy, soft material to work with,’ he says. He shows me some of the chairs-in-progress. They’re curved, sleek, playful: all fluid lines and movement. The designer tells me that he wants to introduce a ‘humorous and weird’ counterpoint to the austere surroundings of the museum.
There’s also a theatrical element to the installation. Once a month, dancers and actors, including those from the Munich Kammerspiele theater company, will perform with the chairs. ‘The idea is that we’ll start with one chair and one person in the room. Then a second person will be introduced into the equation and they’ll have to find each other, sit together, and have a conversation.’
As well as navigating the complexities of the vast, 800 m2 Mittelhalle, Gamper has also adapted the lighting. The space’s natural skylight had previously been replaced, for insulation purposes, by halogen bulbs: too severe for the kind of intimate environment Gamper wished to stage. So, he collaborated with the company Occhio to create 200, individually controllable lights that allow for a seemingly infinite number of ‘lighting situations’.
Despite this fastidious attention to detail, Gamper talks about doubt as a driving force in his work and what it might mean for the future of design. ‘I feel like doubt is a very powerful tool that will become even more important in the future with AI. Doubt is something that’s very difficult to program as a concept into a machine. It’s the real difference between humans and machines.’
Gamper has previously referred to his work as ‘3D drawing’. As a designer who refuses to play by the rules of his field, how does he feel about exhibiting his work as art? ‘I consider myself a designer because I make things that people can use, but I’ve also shown in museums and art galleries. For me, it’s about questioning how the system works, rather than finding an answer.’ He refers to the chairs as ‘functional’ or ‘sittable’ sculptures.
Indeed, Gamper’s background is embedded in craftsmanship. Aged just 14, he began his career as an apprentice cabinet-maker in the mountains of Italy. Despite cutting his teeth within this conservative tradition, it wasn’t until he later visited Milan that he became influenced by the ‘new language’ of postmodern design. ‘Art gave me a more conceptual backbone for my practice,’ he says. ‘As an artist, you observe a lot more, whereas, as a designer, you’re trying to solve something.’
With his wife, sculptor Francis Upritchard, and the jeweler Karl Fritsch, Gamper coined a neologism – Gesamtkunsthandwerk – to describe this fusing of artisanship and high style. He jokes how the perceived boundary between design and art has shifted over the years, with the question ‘Is it art?’ becoming ‘Is it art or is it design?’ However, Gamper welcomes the kind of cross-pollination that’s developed between the two spheres. ‘The design world has tried to imitate the art world a lot: you see lots of young designers doing very sculptural work. But you also see lots of artists doing design. Suddenly, objects are really polished, using the same software, material, and finishes.’
In his own work, Gamper values the way the ‘irrational’ drives of artmaking can help to inflect and reshape the cooler, more ‘rational’ imperatives of design. Does he consider chairs to be art or design – or both? ‘Chairs are design,’ he says. But adds, smiling: ‘If you sit on it, then it’s a chair; if you look at it, then it’s art.’ As the evening draws on and the studio empties, I ask Gamper one final question. He once said that the perfect chair doesn’t exist. Does he still think that’s true? He refers me to yet another trenchant example of the German language: eierlegende Wollmilchsau. Roughly translatable as ‘egg-laying wool-milk-sow’, it connotes the ideal farm animal. In other words, something too good to be true. Gamper laughs. ‘I have a feeling that the perfect chair would be quite boring.’
‘Martino Gamper: Sitzung’ runs at Haus der Kunst, Munich, from July 28, 2023, to April 4, 2024.
Martino Gamper is represented by Anton Kern Gallery (New York), The Modern Institute (Glasgow), and Galleria Franco Noero (Turin).
Daniel Culpan is a writer based in London. He won the 2016 Frieze Writer’s Prize.
Published on July 24, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Martino Gamper, "100 Chairs in 100 Days", 2007, London. Photograph by Angus Mill. 2. Martino Gamper, "100 Chairs in 100 Days", RMIT Design Hub Gallery, 2006. Photograph by Tobias Titz.