Two design students, high standards and a clever idea. 40 years ago, Manfred Wolf and Jean-Marc da Costa founded a company that was to combine innovative luminaire design with high technological and craftsmanship standards. Since then, serien.lighting has stood for an uncompromising focus on design quality, technical expertise, innovation and avant-garde standards like almost no other luminaire manufacturer. The extensive portfolio ranges from almost archetypal ceiling lights such as “Annex” and “Draft” to technically sophisticated and decorative designs such as “Poppy” and solutions that emphasise basic geometric shapes such as “Reflex” to Uwe Fischer’s “Jones” floor lamp and Floyd Paxton’s variable and elegant classic “Zoom”, with which serien.lighting has reinvented the traditional chandelier for the present day.
To celebrate the company’s fortieth anniversary in proper style, a comprehensive exhibition and retrospective of serien.lighting’s individual luminaire designs will open at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main on 2 March. The title IN SERIEN of the show, which runs from 3 to 24 March 2024, describes, according to the announcement, “the initial motivation that led to the founding of the company and also gave it its name: The exploration of formally reduced products and a contemporary aesthetic based on serial production, which was to use new technologies to set itself apart from the expressive one-offs of the 1980s”. The exhibition aims to demonstrate how consistently the two founders and their team have maintained this basic approach over four decades and how it has been successfully reinterpreted time and again in terms of form and technology.
The exhibition concept picks up on both the straightforwardness of the company’s development and the motif of unobtrusively filigree objects in space, which forms the basis of serien.lighting’s product design, and translates both into a larger scale. Wolf and da Costa follow the strict geometry of Richard Meier’s museum architecture and present the anniversary show as a modular grid in space, in which early designs are placed on an equal footing with current models and supplemented by special developments – e.g. for synagogues and libraries. Books, catalogues and posters from 40 years of company history round off the exhibition.
IN SERIEN
03 – 24 March 2024
Museum Angewandte Kunst
Schaumainkai 17,
60594 Frankfurt am Main
https://www.museumangewandtekunst.de/en/
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