Sabine Marcelis gets her first museum show in Zürich

Sabine Marcelis has opened Light and Color, her first museum exhibition, at Zürich's Museum für Gestaltung. It is the first show devoted entirely to her work since she founded her studio 15 years ago.

The Rotterdam-based New Zealander has a knack for viral objects. Her credits include IKEA's best-selling lamp, the Varmblixt "donut lamp", and the resin Candy Cube tables that made her name in 2014. In fifteen years she has gone from Design Academy Eindhoven student to one of the most in-demand designers working today.

"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." She added: "It feels pretty special."

What's on show?

The exhibition gathers 17 key pieces from the past decade and a half, reaching back to Tall Stripe — her first-ever mirror — and the Candy Cubes, the signature resin tables that catapulted her to international acclaim in 2014.

Marcelis is adamant this is not a retrospective. "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."

Accordingly, the exhibits are arranged by colour rather than chronology, blending into each other like the soft gradients of her curved glass chaise longues made for Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (the No Fear of Glass seats).

Her core materials — glass, resin and stone — recur throughout, with spotlights showing the reflections and shadows she has learned to elicit through years of experimentation. A prime example: her Lokum coffee table for Acerbis, several of them stacked on a curved wall to show how the glass shifts in colour and water-like reflection at different angles and levels of light.

Two room-scale installations, reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms, throw back endless reflections of the IKEA donut lamp and her three-metre-tall Column lava lamp for Mathmos.

Why now?

For curator Damian Fopp, the installations are less Instagram bait than a corrective. "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 added: "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 on her process.

The show also tracks a widening of scale and ambition: installations for Coachella and Apple's Cupertino headquarters, plus a pivot to 99 per cent biobased resin in production.

Materials remain her North Star regardless of project size. "I wrote a one-sentence summary of what my studio does ten years ago," she recalled. "'A studio for material, installation and object design. Forever in search of magical moments within materiality and manufacturing processes to create unexpected experiences.'" Her verdict: "I wouldn't change that sentence today if I had to make the same summary again." For a designer allergic to looking back, that's about as close to a credo as it gets — and the Zürich show suggests the sentence still holds.