From MoMA’s collection to Coachella’s art program: the two audiences of Sabine Marcelis

Portrait of Sabine Marcelis, the Rotterdam-based artist and designer whose Lisse sofa is made by LaCividina

Two American museums hold work by Sabine Marcelis: MoMA in New York City, and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, for which she also made Panorama in 2024, in colored mirror. Then there is the other audience, the one that never buys a museum ticket. In 2025 her name was on the Apple Fall Event; in 2026 Maze joined the Coachella Art Program. Both sides fit a practice run from the harbor of Rotterdam, where the vocabulary stays short and exact: cast resin, colored glass, two-way mirror, natural stone, shaped into pure forms that put each material’s properties on display. The honors came fast: International Breakthrough Artist of the Year at GQ Men of the Year in 2019, then Designer of the Year for Wallpaper* in 2020, for Monocle in 2023 and at the Dezeen Awards in 2024.

On a contract floor, the piece to know is Lisse, the sofa and pouf she drew in 2025 for LaCividina. The two names were already linked: when she did the interiors of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Research Centre, the seating she picked was Osaka, Pierre Paulin’s 1967 sofa, now reissued by LaCividina. La Mercanti carries both, so a U.S. lobby or executive lounge can be planned around either one, or around the pair.