Sabine Marcelis Reflects on 15 Years in First Museum Show

Seventeen pieces spanning 15 years have come together at Zürich's Museum für Gestaltung in the first museum exhibition dedicated entirely to Sabine Marcelis's work. The Rotterdam-based Kiwi designer, who went from Design Academy Eindhoven student to one of the most in-demand designers working today, says the show forced her to do something she rarely does: look back.

"This is the first time a museum has brought so much of my work together in one place," Marcelis told Dezeen. "I'm always so preoccupied with what's next that I don't like to look back so much, but it's amazing to have this moment to actually stop and look back for a minute."

The exhibition, called Light and Color, reaches back to Tall Stripe, her first-ever mirror, and the resin Candy Cubes that catapulted her to international acclaim in 2014. It also brings forward the objects that made her a household name online, from IKEA's best-selling Varmblixt "donut lamp" to a three-metre-tall Column lava lamp made for Mathmos.

Is it a retrospective?

Marcelis insists it isn't. "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."

So instead of a timeline, the exhibits are arranged by colour, blending into each other like the soft gradients she favours in her curved glass chaise longues for the Barcelona Pavilion. Her favourite materials – glass, resin and stone – recur throughout, with carefully placed spotlights showing off the reflections and shadows she's learned to elicit through years of experimentation.

A prime example is the Lokum coffee table for Acerbis, several of which are stacked on a curved wall. Seen at different angles and levels of illumination, the glass produces shifting gradients of colour and water-like reflections.

What does this change for visitors?

Curator Damian Fopp argues the show shifts Marcelis's work from the screen back into physical space. Two room-scale installations, reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms, throw back endless reflections of the donut lamp and the Mathmos lava lamp. For Fopp, these aren't Instagram bait. They let visitors experience the full visual effect of the objects in real life.

"Her work circulated widely as images, but no institution had looked at it as a whole," he said. "This also made it interesting to shift the conversation back from online to physical."

He also wanted to reveal what sits behind those polished surfaces. "And 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 commissioned for the exhibition pull back that curtain.

Over 15 years, Marcelis's ambitions have grown in scale and in sustainability. Her studio now uses a 99 per cent biobased resin for production, and her installations have appeared at Coachella and Apple HQ, including a mirrored obelisk for an iPhone launch at Apple Park.

Through all of it, one thing hasn't moved: her studio's one-sentence mission, written a decade ago. "A studio for material, installation and object design. Forever in search of magical moments within materiality and manufacturing processes to create unexpected experiences."

"I wouldn't change that sentence today if I had to make the same summary again," she said.