His handsome, aquiline face lighting up in greeting, Ingo Maurer, aged 85, took his stand at Salone this year. Behind him, a galaxy of ‘Flying Disc' lights hurtled through space. ‘Walking in the Rain', a strange little floor lamp from the MaMo Nouchies collection—a paper-clad version of a Japanese fisherman's cape—waddled on red feet; and ‘Eclipse Ellipse', a small moon wall-light with magnets, allowed passers-by to position their own shadows.
Like the Wizard of Oz, Maurer uses smoke and mirrors—even shattered white porcelain plates, such as his ‘Porca Miseria!' pendant—to act as reflectors and to beam light every which way. As he says, “For 51 years I have been blessed to work with a non-existing material: light.”
Not just new products, but also lighting projects in 2016 put his name in lights outside his new showroom in São Paulo. Inside Estudio Brasil, the rippling ‘Golden Ribbon' glowed above his cracked dinosaur's egg emitting light. Also last year, in Milan, he lit up in crimson the Torre Velasca tower—designed in 1952 by BBPR architects, and currently having a fashionable revival—for the Audi City Lab exhibition during Milan Design Week.
Maurer's fame grew in the 1980s, when he strung up the ‘YaYaHo' light—little spots on trapeze-like cables, powered by the same low voltage as a train set so that you could move them. Playfulness masks his technical skill to bring light to your fingertips. “As a child, I wanted to be a juggler, or a rope dancer,” he says, engagingly. “Balance is as important as playing. My dream was that the local circus in Bavaria would hijack me and let me be part of the troupe.”
Having admired his ‘Birds Birds Birds' chandeliers at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, I bought three of them in 1995 for my Georgian house in Scotland. Each chandelier featured 24 seemingly simple standard light bulbs—in reality, frosted halogen bulbs wired individually to a transformer—set in pairs of goose-feather wings. They arrived in cartridges, along with an installation artist who asked: “Which way do you want them to fly?”
In 2009, when EU regulations stopped production of frosted halogen bulbs, at Maurer's annual party during the Milan fair, ‘Birds Birds Birds' defiantly flew in the face of the ban, each one of its 24 unfrosted bulbs cloaked in a condom. So imagine my joy at seeing the recently hatched, smaller ‘Birdie' flying high on LEDs at Ingo Maurer's stand in 2017.
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