The ’Column’ lava lamp that Dutch-New Zealand designer Sabine Marcelis made for Mathmos stands almost 3m tall, its milky wax drifting inside a cylinder of frosted glass. At her first meeting with Mathmos, the British company behind the original lava lamp, she pictured a room full of outsized ones, as she told Wallpaper* last year. Eight now stand between mirrored walls in ‘Mathmos Lava Columns’, an installation made for her solo exhibition, ‘Light and Color’ at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, their reflections running on without end.
Sabine Marcelis, ‘Light and Color’ at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
Curated by Damian Fopp, ‘Light and Color’ is the first museum exhibition dedicated to Marcelis, named Wallpaper* Designer of the Year in 2020. It continues a line of solo shows the museum has devoted to designers such as Konstantin Grcic (‘This Side Up’, 2007), Jasper Morrison (‘Thingness’, 2016) and Formafantasma (‘Cambio’, 2021-22). Fifteen years in, ‘it is the right moment to look at the practice as a whole’, Fopp tells Wallpaper*.
He places her in the first generation of designers to grow up with social media, speaking directly to their audience, ‘whether that is fans, producers, brands or even museums’, with less need for ‘intermediaries such as magazines or gallery representation’. ‘At the same time, her work with light, colour and reflection is widely known through images, but it has to be experienced in person,’ he says, adding that the show is a chance ‘to understand the material research behind it’.
‘Her work with light, colour and reflection is widely known through images, but it has to be experienced in person, to understand the material research behind it’
Damian Fopp
Marcelis chose each work featured 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 tells Wallpaper*. The curved-glass chaise longues of ‘No Fear of Glass’, made for her 2019 solo show at the Barcelona Pavilion, were due to travel afterwards, ‘but, Covid’, 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.’
Moving liquid has been part of her work since ‘House Wine’, her graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven, a study of home winemaking and its rising bubbles. ‘I basically try to persuade any commissioned project to let me create a fountain or some other moving liquid sculpture,’ she says, finding the motion hypnotic, ‘like watching fire’. Knowing exactly how lava lamps work ‘maybe has taken away that unknown magic for sure’, she concedes, ‘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, she says, the company’s best-selling lamp, and the one design of hers she sees in other people’s homes, on Instagram or at her children’s friends’ houses, hacks included, ‘not all as successful as others’. In Zurich, 125 of the original orange lamps line a mirrored wall graded in colour, which turns them into an 11m walk-through tunnel made with Ikea Switzerland.
The installation of lava lamps created with Mathmos (a smaller bubblegum-pink lava lamp by Sabine Marcelis is available to buy as part of the collaboration)
‘We did not want the show to be objects on pedestals and leave it at that,’ says Fopp, who planned both mirrored rooms with 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’.
For him, the lava lamp room recalls the Infinity Mirror Rooms of the late Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, which brought her work to a very broad audience. ‘I think these rooms can do something similar for Sabine. She already manages to interest people who usually do not care about design.’
In ‘Sunbeam Captured’, made in collaboration with the Dutch artist Boris Acket, lights trace the sun’s path over rippling water and her blue-to-orange mirror to recreate a sunbeam in a rain puddle. Lately, the most ordinary light to stop her 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.’
Sabine Marcelis' material and colour exploration
In resin, a good green is so difficult that Marcelis mostly avoids it, and the studio’s new 99 per cent bio-based resin has a base so red 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 is in her studio’s material library in Rotterdam, where she still has the samples from her first post-student venture into resin, in 2012. Those on show were all made new, ‘because I wanted them to be perfect’. ‘I’m the opposite to a hoarder in my personal life, but when it comes to colour-creating, there is something sacred about any experiment,’ she says, afraid she might not be able to recreate one.
‘I’m the opposite to a hoarder in my personal life, but when it comes to colour-creating, there is something sacred about any experiment’
Sabine Marcelis
The larger glass samples reminded Fopp of Ambiente spaziale: Utopie, Lucio Fontana and Nanda Vigo’s environment for the 1964 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’.
Christian Brändle, the museum’s director, tells Wallpaper* that Marcelis ‘does not always begin with a specific object in mind’. Treating design as ‘fundamental research, embracing experimentation, testing and uncertainty’ lets her develop work ‘that might never have emerged through more conventional design processes’. He hopes students at the Zurich University of the Arts, of which the museum is part, take from her ‘a willingness to take risks and a deep curiosity about materials, production processes and our surroundings – particularly the interplay between light and different materials’.
‘Many hands and brains are involved in bringing projects to life – it’s not just me, it’s a whole ecosystem’
Sabine Marcelis
Making a Show, the accompanying book from Apartamento, photographed by Mattia Balsamini, shares the changes a cast-resin ‘Candy Cube’ goes through before it is polished, steps Marcelis likens to the winemaker’s in her graduation project, and the ‘many hands and brains involved in bringing projects to life – it’s not just me, it’s a whole ecosystem’.
Her redesign of the VitraHaus Loft in 2024 drew on her family home, a former paper factory in Rotterdam’s Coolhaven, where she has lived at times with ‘Candy Cubes’, a ‘Voie’ light, a ‘Tall Stripe’ mirror, ‘Lokum’ tables, a ‘Boa’ pouf and ‘Varmblixt’, none of them destroyed by her children, ‘or vice versa’. In a home she calls ‘not the most conventional’, she checks their light temperature and proportions. ‘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.’
‘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. museum-gestaltung.ch
