Sonia Rentsch & Robin Stein Are Young Talents for Marset

Marset have collaborated with set designer Sonia Rentsch and photographer Robin Stein for their new Young Talents initiative. The Spanish brand is focused on exploring artistic fields and in turn expanding public perception of their purview, facilitated by meaningful partnerships with emerging artists. Going beyond just the product, the collaborations intend to explore the ‘beauty of light’, inviting artists to explore personal interpretations of Marset designs to capture new meanings.

Inspired by the intimate warmth of the portable LED Bicoca lamp, Rentsch and Stein conceptualised “the optimism of brightening life”, combining natural and manufactured elements to create a contemporary, joyful Nature Morte.

Sonia Rentsch consistently draws on nature throughout her work, harking back to a childhood spent in the Australian Grampian Mountains. After graduating from RMIT in 2002, Rentsch worked as an industrial designer for 10 years before finding her niche working on still life projects in Berlin. Robin Stein’s varied portfolio and bold use of depth and colour was the perfect match for the Marset project. “It’s so important to me to find good light. I asked Robin to shoot the job because I like his lighting. Marset makes beautiful lights. It all fits nicely together,” says Rentsch.

Nature Morte is a continually evolving art form, with the likes of 3D digital renderings today being considerable alternatives to actual props. Rentsch and Stein consciously engaged with the latter, seeing the value in real-world experience over virtual.

“Actual physical and tactile engagement with objects and materials is really important to how we work. I feel like a lot of my drive to photograph objects comes from an enthusiasm for materials and the process of arranging things,” says Stein.

“It’s visceral, it comes from a deep understanding of object, space and arrangement, some place magic and innate,” says Rentsch.

When it comes to materials, both artist and photographer concurred there is no singular definition of beauty. Unexpected inspiration came from concrete blocks that Stein, an avid collector, found on a street corner. They ended up being foundational props for the Marset series; some shots see the Bicoca lamp balanced precariously atop rocky offcuts, while in others it’s perched between them like a vibrant beacon.

Rentsch was inspired to add flowers, some real and some false, by an ongoing project she has been working on for Hermes. One scarf print, “featuring a floral arrangement in incredible detail…was most certainly the inspiration for me to put pencil to paper and sketch the lamp concept,” she says.

The abstract scenes use bright flowers to playfully complement the Bicoca’s polycarbonate surface, the concrete rocks providing further texture and weight. “Light and nature in the right amounts are the simplest ingredients for joy,” says Rentsch. The lamps “bring light to darker corners of our personal universes.”