Anton Gerner is an award-winning furniture designer and maker based in East Hawthorn. From a showroom and workshop that was once the local dairy, he conceives and creates one-off pieces of furniture for Australian and international clients.
Following the success of his 2019 & 2025 solo exhibitions, which led to pieces being acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, this exhibition sees Anton pushing the boundaries even further to celebrate furniture as both functional art and a vessel of memory.
Latent Space: Tradition Reframed
THE ANTON GERNER EXHIBITION III
Gerner’s practice operates in an unusual territory — somewhere between craft and design, restraint and disruption, ornament and minimalism, the past and the future. He describes this territory as “Latent Space”: an in-between place where inherited craft knowledge and contemporary design thinking coexist. In this space, tradition is neither preserved unchanged nor rejected, but reconfigured.
The exhibition forms part of the Melbourne Design Week 2026 program, which invites you to Design the World You Want. For Anton, that’s a world that honours the past while fearlessly embracing the future.
Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.