Belgian Lighting Designer Koen Van Guijze’s Exhibition in Antwerp.

Koen Van Guijze is a name you may not know but it’s about time you do. A designer of lamps and luminaires since 1987, the Belgian native is only now revealing his collection in the Marnix Room of the Botanic Sanctuary hotel in Antwerp — a venue he happened to design the lighting for. Over two weekends this month, Van Guijze will be presenting an overview of his own lighting designs from the past four years.

“I have been running my own lighting business for years, but there is still so much creativity in my head, just screaming for a way out,” Van Guijze reveals. “It has eagerly found its way into this lighting collection. And that … is just the beginning.”

The designs are contemporary, sometimes playful, sometimes rough and brutalist, but always imbued with sophisticated details and made of ‘real’ or authentic materials, such as marble, brass, paper, concrete or ceramics. In keeping with the traditional Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, Van Guijze loves ‘imperfectionism’. At the same time, the elegant, minimalist appearance of the designs makes a perfect fit with the architecture. Van Guijze does not see a lamp as an isolated object, but rather as one that sits in conversation with its surroundings.

In contrast to the designs of his lighting line Sofisticato – intended as functional lighting and do not attract too much attention – the lamps from Koen Van Guijze’s own collection stand out. They are more daring, balancing on the border between art and design, and are often made of recycled materials, such as leftover marble, or unconventional materials from a completely different context. For his Y-lamp, for example, Van Guijze was inspired by the colours of the radical Italian designs of the Memphis Group, while the lamp also playfully questions our current times.

As Van Guijze aptly sums it up in just a few short words — “There is poetry in everything I design.”

Related: Lighting the Way: A True Icon of Italian Lighting, Artemide, Arrives at Stylecraft.

[Images courtesy of Koen Van Guijze. Photography by Thomas De Bruyne and Franziska Krieck. ]