“Provoking Magic: Lighting of Ingo Maurer”

BERTH OF ILLUMINATION
Maurer's retrospective highlights his penchant for irreverent lighting solutions.

Photo: Tom Vack/Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Surpassing the chaise chasers and fauteuil fetishists who pore over issues of Elle Decor and Dwell are the kookiest of all design fanatics: the lighting loonies. These enthusiasts obsess over direct versus indirect illumination, rail against the impudent glare of fluorescent bulbs, and banish oblique shadows that can blight a beautiful face with a mere three-centimeter shift in the wrong direction.

Munich-based designer Ingo Maurer is the contemporary lighting deity before whom these types genuflect. Over four decades, he’s skillfully transformed illumination from a necessity to a respected artistic medium, and displayed his mercurial installations at MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Now Maurer has taken on a new challenge: orchestrating a career retrospective—his first solo museum show in the U.S.—at the Cooper-Hewitt, the former Carnegie Mansion whose ornate interiors are notoriously inhospitable to modernist interventions.

The exhibition comprises 51 pieces (20 of which are site-specific) but to his credit, Maurer refused to engage in a battle of wits with the manse’s dark wooden mantelpieces and opulent wallpaper. Instead, he presents the works as if the visitor were touring his atelier—objects stashed here and there, seemingly just completed and not yet put away.

Maurer is far from elitist (his lamps will soon appear on store shelves at Target) and the capricious designs on display are as accessible as the Philippe Starck action figures and other “inspirational objects” filling long vitrines in the exhibit’s central corridor. This playfulness emerges in the most surprising and felicitous ways, whether it’s a lamp with rodents in gold-plated cages (Seven Rats, 2007) or a porcelain chandelier that looks like it’s been caught in midexplosion (Porca Miseria!, 1994).

Maurer is an impish presence—or at least as much as a 6'2", 75-year-old Teuton with shoulder-length white hair can be—and even those who generally eschew audio tours should enjoy his candid and comically conspiratorial narration. In one segment, the designer is cheeky enough to allude to a naughty idiom associated with his signature Lucellino lamp—a bare bulb outfitted with tiny goose-feather wings—but coy enough not to divulge its (phallic) significance.

Surprisingly, the abiding influence of French painter and provocateur Yves Klein is palpable. Like Klein, Maurer glories in the deployment of monochromes— vivid blue (as in an ultramarine room spotlighting his holographic lightbulb, Wo bist du, Edison…?) and lavish expanses of gold (as in the inviting Pensatoio d’ Oro, 2004, a prayer chamber draped entirely in the metallic hue). In his most overt homage, Maurer suspends from the wall a small statue of Klein—a depiction of the artist in free-fall, as seen in the late Postmodernist’s iconic 1960 photomontage, Leap Into the Void—rendered in Klein’s trademark deep-blue pigment.

By and large, Maurer’s restless energy and inventiveness are a marvel to behold, and his carefree attitude toward experimentation delights more often than not. A rare misstep is his Tableaux Chinois, in which goldfish swimming in a mirrored tank cast eerie shadows on the museum wall. Meant to appear haunting and mysterious, the piece looks instead like a failed undergraduate art project.

If you have time, head downstairs to see the Cooper-Hewitt’s exhibit on 18th-century Italian designer Giovanni Piranesi, who is best known for his fantastical furniture and architectural renderings. Though separated by 250 years, the two dreamers share the uncanny ability to imbue the most banal objects with profound beauty and exoticism.