Sabine Marcelis: Light and Color

The Museum für Gestaltung Zürich presents Light and Color at its Toni-Areal site, the first museum exhibition by the Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis. The show is devoted to her luminous works in glass, resin and stone, with site-specific immersive installations created for the spaces of the Toni-Areal.

Three large-scale works form the core of the exhibition: the VARMBLIXT-Tunnel, an 11-meter walkable light tunnel built from 125 IKEA ring lamps; eight Mathmos lava columns of nearly 3 meters, whose mirrors create an apparent infinite space; and Sunbeam Captured, a water and light installation made together with Boris Acket.

The visit works as a sequence of situations of light rather than a display of objects. In the VARMBLIXT-Tunnel you walk through 11 meters of light built from 125 ring lamps, and the effect shifts with every step. In the room with the eight Mathmos lava columns, each nearly 3 meters tall, mirrors multiply the columns into a space that seems to have no end.

Sunbeam Captured, created together with Boris Acket, combines water and light and adds a slower, atmospheric register to an exhibition built on glass, resin and stone. The installations are made to be entered and walked through rather than viewed from a distance, which is where the immersive character of the show comes from.