Infamous furniture designer Martino Gamper set out to create 100 chairs in 100 days by retrofitting a stockpile of used chairs into strange and uncanny configurations. Gamper’s chairs only hint at their essential character — as in a dream sequence or a gestural painting. The closer you look, the closer you come to confronting the existential dilemma of Gamper’s project: that the most solid and humble of all furnitures is nothing but a random constellation of disparate elements held together by a system of belief in their essential ‘chairness’. There is, for example a deconstructed bike frame, a Thonet chair with a stuffed pipe-dress, or two famous chairs pulled apart and re-assembled like the limbs of lovers conjoined, in sacred matrimonial bliss. Gamper’s frankensteinian creations are often surprising, sometimes hilarious and always beautiful.
100 pages, 15 x 19 cm, softcover, published by Dent-De-Leone (London).