Sabine Marcelis Opens First Museum Show in Zurich with Lava and Light

Eight lava columns, each standing 2.56 meters high, anchor Sabine Marcelis's first museum exhibition, which opens at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich on October 30, 2026 and runs through April 4, 2027. The Dutch designer titled the show Light and Color, and it fills the museum's Toni-Areal venue with furniture, lighting, mirrors, and spatial interventions that test how glass, resin, stone, and other materials capture and transform light.

The exhibition combines key works from recent years with installations developed specifically for the Zürich galleries. Material samples and studies sit alongside the finished pieces, giving visitors a view of the experiments behind them. Familiar consumer products stretch into architecture: an endless mirrored field of Mathmos lava lamps, a walk-through tunnel built from IKEA lighting, and moving reflections that bring the rhythms of sunlight and water indoors.

'What I wanted to create was not a retrospective in the traditional sense but a series of spatial experiences that show how light and colour behave across different scales and materials,' Marcelis explains.

The exhibition design stays restrained so the optical effects can unfold. 'Some works are presented individually so you can really focus on their material and optical properties,' she says. 'Others are arranged as full room-sized installations where light and colour permeate the entire space.'

How does the Mathmos collaboration scale up?

Developed through Marcelis's ongoing collaboration with British manufacturer Mathmos, Mathmos Lava Columns gives the lava lamp considerably more room to perform. Eight columns, each 2.56 meters tall, occupy a mirrored environment conceived for the exhibition. Their reflections extend the installation into an apparently infinite field, while pastel Bubblegum pink lava rises, merges, and falls inside frosted glass bottles. White aluminum bases and caps keep the surrounding structure visually quiet, directing attention toward the diffused movement.

'I always wanted to design a giant lava lamp, that was the thought I had in my very first meeting with Mathmos,' Marcelis says.

The collaboration draws on Mathmos's manufacturing expertise at its factory in Poole, Dorset, where Marcelis visited to approve the final prototypes. 'The lava lamp is one of the only objects that has light, colour and translucency all in one,' she explains. 'It does what I try to do with resin and glass, but it adds the dimension of time and movement.'

The Bubblegum palette also carries into a new limited-edition Astro lamp launching in November, translating the collaboration back to a domestic scale.

What happens when IKEA lamps become architecture?

Elsewhere, Marcelis gives another recognizable lighting design an architectural role. Developed with IKEA, the VARMBLIXT collection comprises around twenty objects, with the circle as a recurring motif and its ring-shaped lamp becoming particularly recognizable. For the exhibition, 125 lamps combine with a gradient mirror wall to create an eleven-meter-long, walk-through light tunnel. Repetition transforms a mass-produced object into an environment with its own depth and rhythm. As with the Mathmos columns, the mirror actively reshapes the perceived space, allowing a familiar product to exceed the dimensions of its everyday setting.

What does Sunbeam Captured add?

Created with Boris Acket, Sunbeam Captured turns to the fleeting interaction between sunlight and water. Mechanically generated waves ripple across a thin layer of water while a moving light source traces the passage of the sun. Colored reflections fill the space, amplified by a mirror that shifts from blue to orange in a gradient inspired by light's changing color temperatures.

Alongside the glowing tunnel and flowing lava, the installation gives movement a central role in Marcelis's exploration of materials. Visitors encounter objects whose appearance keeps changing, making time as much a part of the exhibition as glass, color, or light — and setting a template for how the designer's product-scale practice can command museum-scale rooms.