Ingo Maurer Exhibit

I have been excited about the Ingo Maurer lighting exhibit since it hit the Cooper-Hewitts calendar. It is a retrospective of four decades of Maurer’s work (and the man is not even retired yet!). The show includes all of his major works, unseen prototypes, one-off pieces, his commercial line, and videos and photographs documenting his creative process. A quote of his (from a display video) that really struck me went roughly like this: Most lighting designers spend their time trying to come up with ways to cover the light bulb; I am looking for ways to reveal it. Rarely do lamps make it into museum exhibits, but Maurer’s work can hang with the paintings.

Provoking Magic: Lighting of Ingo Maurer on view September 14, 2007-January 27, 2008

Here is a sneak peak from the show:

This piece hung in the main stairwell of the Cooper Hewitt, leading toward the Provoking Magic Exhibit.

Porca Miseria is made of shattered dinner plates

Above are various table lamps from a paper series Maurer produced with Dagmar Mambach. Many of the pieces are still in production and available at unicahome.com