Sabine Marcelis to Fill Zurich Museum With Mirrors, Lava and Orange Light

By Priya Raman

Eight giant lava lamps stand between mirrored walls at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich starting 30 October 2026. That installation anchors 'Light and Color', the first museum exhibition dedicated to Dutch-New Zealand designer Sabine Marcelis, on view through 4 April 2027.

The 'Column' lamp she designed for Mathmos, the British company behind the original lava lamp, stands almost 3m tall. Its milky wax drifts inside a cylinder of frosted glass. At her first Mathmos meeting, Marcelis pictured a room full of outsized lamps — and in Zurich, their reflections run on without end.

What does the show cover?

Curator Damian Fopp surveys 15 years of practice, ignoring chronology. Marcelis picked each work for how it handles light and colour. 'It was very confronting to go through everything and define which projects would make the cut,' she told Wallpaper*. The museum's line of solo designer shows includes 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 said. He places Marcelis in the first generation of designers raised on social media, speaking directly to fans, producers, brands and museums with less need for 'intermediaries such as magazines or gallery representation'.

Which works made the cut?

The exhibition's centrepieces:

• 'Mathmos Lava Columns' — eight nearly 3m lava lamps in a mirrored room
• 'No Fear of Glass' — curved-glass chaise longues from her 2019 Barcelona Pavilion solo show, displayed for only the second time after Covid cancelled their planned tour
• 'Varmblixt' tunnel — 125 of her 2023 orange glass donut lamps for Ikea, lining a mirrored, colour-graded wall to form an 11m walk-through tunnel made with Ikea Switzerland
• 'Sunbeam Captured' — a collaboration with Dutch artist Boris Acket, tracing the sun's path over rippling water and her blue-to-orange mirror

'Varmblixt', Marcelis says, is Ikea's best-selling lamp and the one design she sees in other people's homes — on Instagram, at her children's friends' houses, with hacks 'not all as successful as others'.

Why mirrored rooms?

'We did not want the show to be objects on pedestals and leave it at that,' Fopp said. He planned both mirrored rooms with Marcelis, turning two lamps into 'total spaces'. Inside the tunnel's 'enveloping field of orange light', he says, 'the lamps stay recognisable, but the experience goes far beyond the individual object'.

He compares the lava lamp room to Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms, which brought the late Japanese artist 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.'

What drives the material research?

In resin, a good green proves 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 still chases 'a milky white gradient that doesn't look gross'. All exhibited pieces were made new, 'because I wanted them to be perfect'. The rest of her archive, including 2012 resin samples from her first post-student venture, sits in the studio's material library in Rotterdam.

Museum director Christian Brändle says Marcelis 'does not always begin with a specific object in mind', treating design as 'fundamental research, embracing experimentation, testing and uncertainty'. He hopes students at the Zurich University of the Arts take from her 'a willingness to take risks and a deep curiosity about materials'.

Fopp sees her in a long line of light-and-colour experimenters, citing Lucio Fontana and Nanda Vigo's environment for the 1964 Milan Triennale. Moving liquid has run through her work since 'House Wine', her Design Academy Eindhoven graduation project on home winemaking. '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'.

An accompanying book, 'Making a Show' from Apartamento, photographed by Mattia Balsamini, documents the steps a cast-resin 'Candy Cube' goes through before polishing — steps Marcelis likens to a winemaker's. Her 2024 redesign of the VitraHaus Loft drew on her family home, a former paper factory in Rotterdam's Coolhaven, where she now lives with a lava column. 'It's the only light we have on in the evenings really.'

The show runs at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Toni-Areal, from 30 October 2026 to 4 April 2027.