Spanning 15 years of work, the designer’s first solo museum show is an immersive journey through light, colour and material
Courtesy of Umberto Romito & Ivan Šuta, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK, Light and Colour is the first ever solo museum show dedicated to the work of Sabine Marcelis
Words by Roddy Clarke
When discussing her first solo retrospective showcase, Dutch-New Zealand designer Sabine Marcelis says making the selection of which works to display was a hard challenge. ‘I’m always so preoccupied with what’s next, I don’t like to look back too much,’ she says. ‘But obviously for this show, it was very confronting to go through everything and define which projects would make the cut.’
The result is ‘Light and Colour’, which opened last week at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich. True to Marcelis’ signature style’ it explores the interplay between light, colour and materials such as resin and glass. Rather than marching visitors through her career in order, the exhibition is staged as a circuit, drawing them into her world through lighting, furniture and mirrors from every stage of her practice. ‘I didn’t want the show to feel like a retrospective in the sense of it being a chronological archive,’ she explains. ‘I wanted to rather select a variety of projects that each showed a certain way of working with light and colour.
Courtesy of Umberto Romito & Ivan Šuta, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK, The show features works from the last 15 years of Marcelis’ practice
Marcelis designed the exhibition herself, shaping a sequence of environments that respond to the museum’s architecture. ‘The more intimate spaces have an immersive aspect to them, while open sections follow a colour scheme where the projects flow into one another through colour,’ she says. Nowhere is that vision more vivid than in the light tunnel, lined with 125 of the VARMBLIXT lamps she designed for IKEA in 2023. Reflection, light and colour bounce off one another to dazzling effect.
Courtesy of Umberto Romito & Ivan Šuta, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK, Rather than take viewers through a chronological journey, the exhibition reframes light and colour as core architectural elements, a key factor in Marcelis’ work
Elsewhere, early works such as ‘Tall Stripe’ and ‘Candy Cube’ trace the roots of her practice and remind us how central light and colour are to the architecture of any space. Another standout is ‘Mathmos Lava Columns’, which brings together eight of the ‘Column’ lava lamps Marcelis designed for Mathmos, the company behind the original Lava Lamp. Set within mirrored walls that ‘stretch’ into infinity, the installation is both nostalgic and utterly immersive. ‘The best museum shows I go to leave me with a new appreciation for how materials can be shaped and manipulated, and make me want to create more work myself,’ she says. ‘I hope this makes people more curious and appreciative of how light and colour activate so much.’
Courtesy of Umberto Romito & Ivan Šuta, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK. A standout installation is ‘Mathmos Lava Columns’ featuring eight of the Column Lamps designed by Marcelis for Mathmos
For curator Damian Fopp, the show fits the museum’s commitment to voices that speak to the present, and Marcelis’ work certainly does. ‘It is very much of its time and is shaped by today’s conditions,’ he says. ‘Our museum also has a long history of hosting the first museum exhibition in a designer’s career. This goes all the way back to 1970, when we showed “Balenciaga: Ein Meister der Haute Couture”, Cristóbal Balenciaga’s first (and only) exhibition.’
Courtesy of Umberto Romito & Ivan Šuta, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK. The show has an immersive element throughout drawing people into the process behind Marcelis’ work
Fopp describes the collaboration as a balance of precision and trust, and for Marcelis, the people around her are among the most rewarding parts of her career so far. ‘They make it all possible,’ she says. ‘I spend so much time working because I love it, but I also want to spend that time with people that energise and inspire me. I’m definitely lucky to say that that’s the case.’
Light and Colour by Sabine Marcelis is on show at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich until 4 April 2027.
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