Eight lava lamps stand between mirrored walls in Zurich, and their reflections run on without end. Each is almost 3 metres tall, with milky wax drifting inside a cylinder of frosted glass.
Dutch–New Zealand designer Sabine Marcelis made the Column lamp for Mathmos, the British company behind the original lava lamp. At their first meeting, she pictured a room full of outsized ones, she told Wallpaper* last year. The result, Mathmos Lava Columns, is part of Light and Color, her solo design exhibition at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.
The first museum show for Sabine Marcelis
Curated by Damian Fopp, Light and Color is the first museum exhibition dedicated to Marcelis. Wallpaper* named her Designer of the Year in 2020. The museum has previously staged solo shows for Konstantin Grcic (This Side Up, 2007), Jasper Morrison (Thingness, 2016) and Formafantasma (Cambio, 2021-22).
Fifteen years into her practice, Fopp says it is “the right moment to look at the practice as a whole.”
Fopp places Sabine Marcelis among the first designers to grow up with social media. She speaks directly to fans, producers, brands and museums. She needs fewer intermediaries, such as magazines or gallery representation, to reach them.
Her work is widely known through photographs, Fopp says, but it has to be seen in person. The show, he adds, lets visitors understand the material research behind it.
Marcelis chose each work for how it handles light and colour, setting chronology aside. “It was very confronting to go through everything and define which projects would make the cut,” she says.
The curved-glass chaise longues from No Fear of Glass were made for her 2019 solo show at the Barcelona Pavilion and were due to travel next. The pandemic stopped that, so Zurich is only their second showing. “They were incredibly difficult to produce, and I’m curious if now, seven years later, new possibilities exist for them.”
For another take on glass shaping light, Preciosa’s crystal lighting designs for transforming interiors shows how cut glass can change a room’s mood.
Moving liquid as a constant
Moving liquid has run through her work since House Wine, her graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven. That study examined home winemaking and the rise of bubbles.
“I basically try to persuade any commissioned project to let me create a fountain or some other moving liquid sculpture,” she says. She finds the motion hypnotic, “like watching fire.”
Knowing how lava lamps work “maybe has taken away that unknown magic for sure,” she says. “But it’s also given me lots of inspiration and energy to take it somewhere further.”
Varmblixt, the orange glass donut lamp she designed for Ikea in 2023, is the company’s best-selling lamp, she says. It is also the design she sees most often in other people’s homes, on Instagram and at her children’s friends’ houses. Some of those home versions are “not all as successful as others.”
In Zurich, 125 of the orange lamps line a mirrored wall graded in colour. Made with Ikea Switzerland, the setup forms an 11-metre walk-through tunnel.
Turning objects into spaces
“We did not want the show to be objects on pedestals and leave it at that,” Fopp says. He planned both mirrored rooms with Sabine Marcelis, turning two of her lamps into total spaces. “Multiplying a single object carries a lot of visual potential, and Sabine and her team made the most of it.”
Inside the tunnel’s enveloping field of orange light, he says, “the lamps stay recognisable, but the experience goes far beyond the individual object.”
Fopp compares the lava lamp room to Yayoi Kusama‘s Infinity Mirror Rooms, which brought the late Japanese artist’s work to a very broad audience. He expects a similar effect for Marcelis. “She already manages to interest people who usually do not care about design.”
Sunbeam Captured, made with the Dutch artist Boris Acket, uses lights to trace the sun’s path over rippling water. A blue-to-orange mirror recreates a sunbeam in a rain puddle.
The most ordinary light to stop her recently was a full moon on an evening bike ride. “The clouds passing in front and filtering the bright glow of the moon is so beautiful.”
Working within material limits
Green in resin is so difficult to achieve that Marcelis mostly avoids it. The studio’s new 99 per cent bio-based resin has a base so red that it narrows her palette. In glass, she is still chasing “a milky white gradient that doesn’t look gross.”
The archive she left out of Zurich sits in her studio’s material library in Rotterdam. It holds samples from her first post-student venture into resin, in 2012. The pieces on show were all made new, “because I wanted them to be perfect.”
She calls herself the opposite of a hoarder in her personal life. With colour, though, “there is something sacred about any experiment.”
The larger glass samples reminded Fopp of Ambiente spaziale: Utopie, the 1964 environment by Lucio Fontana and Nanda Vigo for the Milan Triennale. Marcelis, he says, “although she is very contemporary, is part of a long line of artists and designers who have been interested in light, colour and how the two shape space.”
Research before the object
Christian Brändle, the museum’s director, says Marcelis “does not always begin with a specific object in mind.” She treats design as fundamental research, embracing experimentation, testing and uncertainty. That approach lets her develop work that conventional processes might never produce.
Brändle hopes students at the Zurich University of the Arts, of which the museum is part, take away “a willingness to take risks and a deep curiosity about materials, production processes and our surroundings.”
The accompanying book, Making a Show, published by Apartamento and photographed by Mattia Balsamini, follows the changes a cast-resin Candy Cube goes through before it is polished. Marcelis likens those steps to the winemaking in her graduation project. She credits the “many hands and brains involved” and calls it “a whole ecosystem.”
Life at home
Her 2024 redesign of the VitraHaus Loft drew on her family home, a former paper factory in Rotterdam’s Coolhaven. She has lived there with Candy Cubes, a Voie light, a Tall Stripe mirror, Lokum tables, a ‘Boa’ pouf and Varmblixt. None has been destroyed by her children, “or vice versa.”
She checks the light temperature and proportions in a home she calls not the most conventional. “I’m currently living with a lava column and love the soft glow it casts on our home at night. It’s the only light we have on in the evenings really.”
Lamps that revisit a classic form also have a place at home, as seen in Poul Henningsen’s piano lamp returns in limited edition, a vintage reissue worth a click.
Light and Color runs at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Toni-Areal, from 30 October 2026 to 4 April 2027. Making a Show is published by Apartamento with the museum.
The exhibition makes a clear case that Marcelis’s colour and light are inseparable from material and process. Fifteen years of experiments, from glass samples to a 125-lamp tunnel, show a practice built on testing rather than fixed outcomes.
Source: wallpaper.com
Frequently asked questions
What is Light and Color, the Sabine Marcelis exhibition in Zurich?
Light and Color is Sabine Marcelis’s solo design exhibition at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. It is the first museum exhibition dedicated to her, and it was curated by Damian Fopp.
What are the Mathmos Lava Columns in the Zurich show?
The Mathmos Lava Columns are eight lava lamps, each almost 3 metres tall, with milky wax inside a cylinder of frosted glass. Marcelis designed the Column lamp for Mathmos, the British company behind the original lava lamp, and they stand between mirrored walls in the exhibition.
What is the orange lamp tunnel in the Zurich exhibition?
The exhibition includes 125 orange Varmblixt lamps lining a colour-graded mirrored wall, made with Ikea Switzerland. Together they form an 11-metre walk-through tunnel.
What is Varmblixt, the lamp Sabine Marcelis designed for Ikea?
Varmblixt is an orange glass donut lamp that Marcelis designed for Ikea in 2023. The article says it is the company’s best-selling lamp.
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