Although the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition “Provoking Magic: Lighting of Ingo Maurer” represents less than one-third of the German designer’s oeuvre, the show’s 53 pieces reveal the staggering breadth of Maurer’s imagination. Feathers, broken china, goldfish, gilded cages—nothing is off limits as raw material for a luminaire. As the first solo exhibition of Maurer’s work in the United States, visitors to “Provoking Magic,” who may only know Maurer for his Baccarat crystal–encrusted Unicef Snowflake, certainly will be impressed by how tirelessly he has devoted his fertile mind to lighting design.
Maurer hadn’t intended to enter the profession, first apprenticing himself to a typographer and then studying graphic design. But in 1965, staying in a pensione in Venice, he became smitten by the single light bulb hanging over his head. The following year he introduced a prototype of Bulb at the Milan Furniture Fair. This tungsten light bulb housed within a larger glass caricature—a transparent Jonah and whale—attracted the interest of modern design’s biggest manufacturers, and Maurer decided to produce it himself. So began his four-decade-and-counting career as both designer and manufacturer.
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