sabine marcelis turns light and color into immersive spaces at zurich’s museum für gestaltung

SABINE MARCELIS EXPLORES LIGHT AND COLOR IN ZURICH

Mathmos lava lamps stretch into an apparently endless landscape, familiar IKEA lights form a walk-through tunnel, and moving reflections bring the rhythms of sunlight and water indoors. At Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Sabine Marcelis brings these encounters together in Light and Color, her first museum exhibition. Running from October 30, 2026, to April 4, 2027, at the museum’s Toni-Areal venue, the show combines key works from recent years with installations developed specifically for its galleries. Across furniture, lighting, mirrors, and spatial interventions, the Dutch designer explores how glass, resin, stone, and other materials capture and transform light, giving even substantial objects an unexpectedly elusive presence.

The exhibition moves between individual objects and environments that surround the visitor, with material samples and studies offering a closer look at the experiments behind the finished works. ‘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. A restrained exhibition design gives those effects room to unfold, allowing shifts in transparency, reflection, and color to guide the experience. ‘Some works are presented individually so you can really focus on their material and optical properties. Others are arranged as full room-sized installations where light and colour permeate the entire space.’

MATHMOS LAVA COLUMNS MULTIPLY IN A MIRRORED LANDSCAPE

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 standing 2.56 meters high, 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 softly 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 builds on a shared interest in light, color, and translucency, drawing 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. It does what I try to do with resin and glass, but it adds the dimension of time and movement,’ she explains. In Zürich, that movement expands from an object’s interior to the surrounding room through the mirrored walls. The installation’s Bubblegum palette also carries into a new limited-edition Astro lamp launching in November, translating the collaboration back to a domestic scale.

IKEA’S VARMBLIXT TUNNEL MEETS SUNBEAM CAPTURED

Elsewhere, Marcelis gives another recognizable lighting design an architectural role. Developed with IKEA, the VARMBLIXT collection comprises around twenty objects, with the circle emerging 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.

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.

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project info:

name: Sabine Marcelis — Light and Color
designer: Sabine Marcelis | @sabine_marcelis

brand: Mathmos | @mathmos_originals
location: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich | @museumgestaltung
dates: October 30, 2026 – April 4, 2027