Eight towering columns, each standing 2.56 meters high, anchor Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis in her first museum exhibition, Light and Color, at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. Running from October 30, 2026, to April 4, 2027, at the Toni-Areal venue, the expansive showcase features immersive installations and everyday objects transformed through glass, resin, and mirrors.
Fifteen years of experimental furniture, lighting, and spatial interventions fill the galleries in Zurich. These works span creations from early pieces like Tall Stripe up to current collaborative projects.
According to Designboom, the designer organized the galleries into a series of spatial experiences designed to show how optical phenomena behave across different scales and materials instead of presenting a traditional retrospective.
Mathmos Collaboration Creates Monumental Lava Lamp Columns
An expansive collaboration with British manufacturer Mathmos pushes the iconic 1963 lava lamp into monumental scale.
Eight towering columns occupy a mirrored environment where pastel Bubblegum pink lava rises, merges, and falls inside frosted glass bottles. Each column stands 2.56 meters high.
The surrounding structure stays visually quiet with white aluminum bases and caps. Marcelis developed the installation using mirrored walls to extend the glowing columns into an apparently infinite field.
A recognizable circle motif takes over the room where mass-produced domestic items undergo an architectural scaling up. Developed alongside IKEA, the 20-object VARMBLIXT collection contributes 125 ring-shaped lamps to a gradient mirror wall, constructing an eleven-meter-long, walk-through light tunnel that stretches familiar consumer items far beyond their everyday dimensions.
Pigmented Resin Captures Light in Candy Cube Series
Material exploration drives the physical construction of every piece in the museum.
The Candy Cube series uses pigmented resin. Color permeates the core of the material rather than sitting on a surface layer, capturing and redirecting light depending on the angle of illumination.
The Candy Cube series reflects this ongoing fascination.
The exhibition grants visitors a look behind the scenes through material samples and developmental studies alongside finished furniture and lighting.
Motion and ephemeral natural elements join solid glass, stone, and resin in Sunbeam Captured, a collaboration created alongside Boris Acket.
Mechanically generated waves ripple across a thin layer of water while a moving light source traces the passage of the sun. Colored reflections flood the surrounding space, amplified by a specialized mirror shifting smoothly from blue to orange in a gradient inspired by changing light color temperatures.
Museum Exhibition Remains Open Through April 2027
The exhibition remains open to the public at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich venue at Toni-Areal through April 4, 2027.
A new limited-edition Astro lamp scheduled to launch in November will translate the Bubblegum palette from the Mathmos collaboration back to a domestic scale following the museum launch.