Sabine Marcelis: Light and Color
“Light and Color”, Sabine Marcelis’s first solo exhibition at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, opens on 30 October 2026. Marcelis is one of the internationally acclaimed designers of her generation. Born and raised in New Zealand, she studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven and established her own studio in Rotterdam in 2014. Since then, she has developed furniture, lighting, mirrors and large-scale installations, combining product design with spatial and artistic approaches. Working with industrial partners, she incorporates production processes and material research into her designs, exploring the visual possibilities of light, colour and material. Her precise use of translucent materials such as resin and glass is particularly characteristic, with carefully controlled lighting used to accentuate their properties. Her reduced formal language places the materials themselves at the centre, giving her works a distinctive visual presence.
Light Within Reach
Under the title “Light and Color”, the exhibition brings together works spanning the past fifteen years. These include early key works such as the “Candy Cube” series, featuring colourful side tables and seating made from cast resin, as well as the installation “Sunbeam Captured”, created in collaboration with Dutch artist Boris Acket. A light tunnel developed in collaboration with IKEA Switzerland, using fixtures from their joint VARMBLIXT collection, creates the illusion of an infinite space through carefully orchestrated reflections.
The selection unfolds as a spatial parcours of open and more concentrated settings that trace Marcelis’ artistic development. Carefully selected objects alternate with immersive spatial scenarios. Insights into material studies and experiments offer a glimpse into her working process: light becomes matter, colour becomes an object, transparency becomes a surface and reflection becomes space. Speaking about the idea behind the exhibition, Sabine Marcelis says: “This exhibition was not intended to be an archive of past projects, but rather to show how I work and how we explore light, material and colour in my studio in a playful way.”
