Phases

Endlessly curious about the behavior of light, artist and designer Sabine Marcelis has built one of the most celebrated practices in design today from her studio in the harbor of Rotterdam. Phases, her first solo exhibition in the United States, is the fullest expression of that pursuit to date — an entirely new body of work conceived exclusively for Salon 94 Design, rooted in the cycles and phenomena of the natural world. Phases considers how objects shift through changing conditions rather than exist as fixed forms.

The title names both a subject and a logic, and the two are inseparable in Marcelis's practice. Color deepens or recedes depending on light temperature and illumination. Reflection destabilizes orientation. Light moves through resin in ways that alter the physical reading of the work itself. The exhibition draws from phenomena that operate just beyond immediate perception — lunar phases, earthshine, gravity, atmospheric color, the gradual transition between darkness and daylight — and translates their logic into material form.