In Sabine Marcelis’s hands, light becomes material and color becomes a three-dimensional experience. With the first museum exhibition dedicated to the Dutch-New Zealand designer, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich is bringing together her key works since she founded her studio in 2011.
Sabine Marcelis (1985) is among the most influential voices in contemporary design. Her works operate at the interface between design, art, and architecture and include furniture, lighting, mirrors, and spatial installations. Typical of her practice is a meticulous orchestration of translucent materials such as resin and glass, whose luminosity she enhances through targeted lighting. This results in works of great visual radiance and formal clarity.
The exhibition brings together works from the last fifteen years – including early key pieces such as Tall Stripe, the group Candy Cube, and the installation Sunbeam Capture, a collaboration with Boris Acket. Complementing the selection are lights, furniture, and mirrors, as well as a new site-specific installation developed especially for the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.
Reflecting on the intention behind the exhibition, designer Sabine Marcelis explains: “I didn’t want this exhibition to be an archive of past projects but rather an insight into how I work, how we play with light, material and colour in my studio.”
Visitors can gain insights into Marcelis’s working methods based on the background information provided on material studies and experiments. Transparency, reflection, color, and light are rendered tangible here not only as creative media but as central elements in our experience of space. Color proves to be more than a mere surface treatment: it can completely alter how a setting is perceived.
The exhibition unfolds as a circuit leading through both open and denser settings. Carefully selected works alternate with immersive stagings in which viewers can experience the spatial effects of light, color, and reflections. In a light tunnel realized as part of the artist’s collaboration with IKEA Switzerland, for example, lamps from the jointly conceived VARMBLIXT collection create the impression of infinity through sophisticated reflections. A second mirrored spatial installation developed especially for the exhibition – Mathmos Lava Columns – features XL floor to ceiling lava lamps designed by Marcelis for Mathmos and uses light and movement to visually blur the boundaries of the space.
The exhibition scenography, developed by Studio Sabine Marcelis, picks up on geometric motifs from the designer’s vocabulary of forms and translates them into a reduced design with materiality at the forefront. Carefully placed lighting accents showcase the works and emphasise their materiality, color, and spatial presence.
With Sabine Marcelis – Light and Color, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich highlights its standing as an international platform for the latest design trends. Following solo exhibitions with Jasper Morrison (2016), Formafantasma (2022), and Tatiana Bilbao (2024), the museum is once again mounting a comprehensive showcase dedicated to an internationally influential designer.
Artist biography
Sabine Marcelis is a designer who operates a studio in the port of Rotterdam. A graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven (2011), she works in the fields of product, installation, and interior design, with a strong focus on materiality.
Marchelis’s oeuvre is marked by a reduced formal language that emphasizes the specific qualities of the respective materials. In collaborations with industrial partners, she develops objects and spaces that incorporate production processes and material research to create new visual effects. Marcelis views her designs as sensory experiences in which perception itself becomes a function. Her work ranges from handmade unique pieces to serial product designs and cultural installations.
Sabine Marcelis – Light and Color
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
October 30, 2026 – April 4, 2027
museum-gestaltung.ch
Photography: Umberto Romito & Ivan Šuta, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK
