Sabine Marcelis builds rooms out of light for her first museum exhibition
At the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the designer takes a career spent investigating the relationships between matter, colour, and light and turns it into a show you can walk into.
Few contemporary designers are as recognisable as Sabine Marcelis. With a design language built on pink and orange hues, light gradients, and glasswork, the Dutch designer has truly created an entire aesthetic that has defined part of the design field in recent years. “Sabine Marcelis – Light and Color” runs until April 4, 2027, at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.
It is the first time a museum has given the designer a show of her own, which is a little surprising given how widely her work circulates. Her objects have sat in fashion boutiques, collectors’ apartments and design fairs for over a decade. The curators of the show have purposefully set aside the retrospective format in favour of larger installations, celebrating Marcelis’ approach.
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Sabine Marcelis, Light and Color
IKEA VARMBLIXT
The VARMBLIXT is one of Marcelis’ most well-known collections, one that launched her into mainstream production. The ring-shaped lamp became its emblem, and in Zürich she gathers 125 of those lamps into an 11 metre corridor that visitors can walk through, set against a mirrored wall. The effect depends entirely on repetition and reflection, elevating a simple object that is now in thousands of homes across the globe.
The transition from ordinary to immersive has defined her career from the start. One of her most famous objects, the Candy Cube from 2014, began as a plain block of glossy cast resin that she designed as a pedestal for displaying bags and shoes. Despite its apparent simplicity, the cube’s materiality becomes almost spiritual to the observer, allowing it to adapt from a simple window design in Céline stores to immersive sets for Lorde’s concerts, leading to it being acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 2025.
In a similar way, the VARMBLIXT lamp also reflects that philosophy, where a simple shape with curated materiality can be both a mass-produced product and an immersive installation, depending on how you style it.
Lava columns for Mathmos
Mathmos is a British company founded in 1963 by Edward Craven Walker, the inventor of the lava lamp. For this collaboration, Marcelis has designed an installation featuring 8 lava lamp columns that are almost 3 metres in height, exhibited in a chamber lined with mirrors. Each column is a frosted glass bottle on a white aluminium base, holding pale pink bubbles that rise and merge with one another.
The specific shade of pink chosen, the candy shade, has now become synonymous with Marcelis‘ work, and its presence is especially apparent in this installation as the colour completely fills the room by reflecting into the mirrored walls. The collaboration also includes the Astro lamp, a smaller bedside lamp in the same colours that will be on sale in November.
Sunbeam Captured
The designer has been collaborating with the artist Boris Acket for a few years now, exploring together the relationships between water and light. Sunbeam Captured is an installation that mimics how sunlight plays across water surfaces during the day, as a thin layer of water covers a pool and machinery sends waves across it. A light moves slowly overhead, and its reflections spread across the room in colour through a mirror shaded from blue to orange.
Of the three, this part of the exhibition is the most pure and conceptual, as it is disconnected from a commercial product or furniture category, aiming instead for experiential design and material research.
