The most evocative lamps of the Design Museum’s collection

This weekend the Llum BCN festival will transform the Poblenou district into an outdoor research lab, where artists and creators will explore new meanings for the public space through light, questioning the limits of our perceptions. This year, 26 artistic installations, as well as 17 others created by different design schools in the city, will connect lighting design with other disciplines: from architecture, art and movement to virtual reality, science and AI.

In the Design Museum of Barcelona, we keep an extensive collection of lamps, with pieces that lie between design and art and propose new and suggestive forms and interpretations in the domestic space. Such is the case of the Alta Costura floor lamp, which is part of the exhibition From the World to the Museum. Product Design, Cultural Heritage. Yearning to achieve a warm and environmentally evocative hue, Josep Aregall plays with unconventional forms, wrapping the lamp with an element of enormous proportions.

Within the same formal boundaries, we can also find the work of Manel Ybargüengoitia. One of its most emblematic attributes is its interest in zoomorphic forms. Pixi is an example of this preference for the animal world; in this case, the mouse, which stands out for its eminently expressive character when several of these objects are arranged simultaneously.

Halfway between candlestick and oversized wall light, the Anna lamp is part of the Carles Riart’s “Utiles” collection, which retrieves the most speculative and with the greatest technological and conceptual complexity developed in the seventies from his first collection of special furniture. Almost all of his works hide a personal story. In this case, the piece takes the name of its goddaughter, which serves as an example of poetic intensity of the collection, in which Riart took to the limit the expressive aspects of the object in order to question the classical and orthodoxical typology of furniture.

The most remarkable aspect of the Zeleste table lamp, by Àngel Jové and Santiago Roqueta, is perhaps the use of alabaster as the exclusive material. This provides the piece with pseudo-magical connotation since there is a light emanating from an apparently solid stone element making it feel disquieting, almost hidden. This way, a special relationship between object and observer is established in which it is difficult to determine who is at whose service.