Ingo Maurer

Ingo Maurer is one of the leading lighting designers worldwide and he is one of the most important international product designers. He regards himself modestly an autodidact. He was born on the island of Reichenau located in the Lake Constance in 1932. Being a trained typesetter and a graduated graphic designer, Maurer started designing lamps as early as 1966 after his three years of working as a free designer in New York and San Francisco.  Characterised by the Pop Art movement, Ingo Maurer founded the studio Design M in a backyard of Munich. Later he renamed it to Ingo Maurer GmbH. From the beginning on the lighting designs by Maurer impressed by a seemingly infinite variety. The design of the lamp called Bulb is characterised by the simplicity of Pop Art and it has already been admitted to the Design Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969. The standard light bulb surrounded by an oversized blown light bulb out of glass with a chromed socket rang in a new light era in which the objects were reduced to the light sources and what is more, they got rid of the classical lamp stand and of the lampshade as well. YaYaHo, the system of low voltage halogen which Maurer developed as a modular system in 1984, enables apparently infinite flexibility up to now and it offers a new insight into room and lighting. Maurer designs lamps telling stories, thus turning into new stories themselves. The table lamp Lucellino developed in 1992 is graceful and emotionally loaded with its handmade wings made out of goose feathers. Maurer succeeded in making its sight delighting and inviting to dream. The Zettel'z has a lyric effect - literally speaking. You may attach notes of Japanese paper with loving and melodic messages centrically around the lamp which then are kept by clamps. Maurer and his staff design and create milestones of lighting design in Munich down to the present day. Since 2009 he has established a "studioshowroomwerkstattatelier" where people may get their personal insight into his unique light art.