Martino Gamper: Endgrained

Last year I visited Martino at his Hackney studio—lunch cooked amid prototypes and off-cuts, conversation ranging freely. Read that Dispatch here. We had already commissioned his hooks and chairs for our flagship store through Michael Lett, so the visit felt less like an introduction than a continuation.

In late March, Objectspace opens Endgrained—a major new commission and his first significant solo exhibition in Aotearoa for some time. The gallery on Rose Road will be reconfigured into a room for actual use. Chairs and tables, made to be sat at. Visitors can book the space for rehearsals, meetings, even an AGM. It inhabits the role of a community centre or church hall. Free, open, occupied.

The material is the story within the story.

Every piece is built from materials that did not exist before Martino conceived them. Working with Italian company ALPI, he has taken the waste stream of industrial veneer production, the offcuts, the remnants, the material the process discards, and transformed it through dyeing, laminating and compressing into something entirely new. A wood that has never grown. Grain and colour with no precedent in nature. Not a simulation of timber, not a composite pretending to be something else. A genuinely new material, with its own visual language, its own character, its own logic.

That it came from waste is not incidental. That is the whole point.

I have witnessed Martino's work. The impulse is always the same, whether he is collecting discarded chairs or reinventing the raw material itself. He looks at what has been written off and sees possibility where others see an ending. The material changes. The instinct doesn't.

Endgrained also includes a companion project—developed with Objectspace and Auckland designers James Goggin and Shan James of Practise—exploring the timber histories of Aotearoa. The life of a tree, the politics of its production and use.

Martino Gamper: Endgrained
Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
27 March – 31 May 2026.

An edited version travels to the Sir Miles Warren Gallery in Ōtautahi Christchurch, opening 17 July.