Sabine Marcelis has made objects that spread across the internet, from the donut lamp she designed for IKEA to her Candy Cube tables. Now the Rotterdam-based designer is opening up her process in her first sabine marcelis museum exhibition.
The show, called Light and Color, opens at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich. It is the first sabine marcelis museum exhibition devoted entirely to Marcelis’s work. She founded her studio 15 years ago.
She trained at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Since then, she has become one of the most prolific and sought-after designers working today.
“This is the first time a museum has brought so much of my work together in one place,” Marcelis told Dezeen. “I’m always preoccupied with what’s next, so I don’t often look back. It’s amazing to have a moment to stop and look back for a minute.”
“It feels pretty special,” she said.
Inside the sabine marcelis museum exhibition
The exhibition includes 17 key pieces from the past 15 years. The earliest is Tall Stripe, the first of her many mirrors. The show also includes her resin Candy Cubes, which brought her international acclaim in 2014.
Mirrors and reflected light run through Marcelis’s early output, and a similar fascination with glass shows up in Toronto‘s Spadina Museum. Ry Van Der Hout’s Stained-Glass and Mirror Sculptures show how glass and mirror can transform a historic interior.
Marcelis does not want visitors to see the show as a retrospective. She said she avoided a chronological archive. Instead, she chose projects that show different ways of working with light and colour.
“I didn’t want the show to feel like a retrospective in the sense of a chronological archive,” she said. “I wanted to select a variety of projects that each show a different way of working with light and colour.”
The curators arranged the works by colour rather than by date. One work flows into the next, which mirrors the soft gradients Marcelis uses in her curved glass chaise longues for the Barcelona Pavilion.
Glass, resin and stone appear throughout the galleries, which are her most frequently used materials. The design exhibition displays them with care, and carefully placed spotlights bring out the reflections and shadows that she has refined through years of experimentation.
The Lokum coffee table, made for Acerbis, shows this clearly. The tables are stacked on a curved wall. Their colour gradients and water-like reflections shift with the viewing angle and the level of light.
Glass stays central to Marcelis’s practice, and Gubi’s reworking of a classic Murano-style design offers another take on glass craftsmanship. Gubi’s reimagined Carlo Nason Lotus lamp is worth a look for its luminous glasswork.
Two room-scale installations recall Yayoi Kusama‘s Infinity Mirror Rooms. They repeat the reflections of Marcelis’s IKEA donut lamp and the three-metre-tall Column lava lamp she designed for Mathmos.
Damian Fopp, the show’s curator, sees these rooms as a way to experience the objects in person at this sabine marcelis museum exhibition. Visitors can see the full visual effect in real space rather than on a phone screen.
“Her work circulated widely as images, but no institution had looked at it as a whole,” Fopp said. “This also made it interesting to shift the conversation back from online to physical.”
Fopp also wanted to show the work behind the images. “We wanted to show what lies behind those calm, effortless images: the testing, prototyping and production that I discovered when I visited her studio in Rotterdam.”
A mini-documentary and a book, both made for the sabine marcelis museum exhibition, document how her team creates these pieces.
Her projects have grown in scale and in environmental ambition. Her production now uses resin that is 99 per cent biobased. She has also made installations for Coachella and for the Apple headquarters.
Marcelis says materials guide every project, whatever its size. She recalled a one-sentence summary of her studio written ten years ago. “‘A studio for material, installation and object design. Forever in search of magical moments within materiality and manufacturing processes to create unexpected experiences.'”
She would keep that sentence. “I wouldn’t change that sentence today if I had to make the same summary again.”
Source: dezeen.com
Frequently asked questions
Where is Sabine Marcelis’s first museum exhibition, Light and Color, being held?
The Light and Color exhibition opens at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich. It is the first museum exhibition devoted entirely to Marcelis’s work.
How many key pieces are included in the Light and Color exhibition?
The exhibition includes 17 key pieces from the past 15 years of Marcelis’s work. The earliest is Tall Stripe, the first of her many mirrors.
Is the Sabine Marcelis exhibition organized chronologically or by date?
No, the curators arranged the works by colour rather than by date. Marcelis also said she did not want the show to feel like a retrospective or a chronological archive.
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