He is one of the few greats in his metier, with a distinctive, unmistakable signature running through his entire oeuvre. The lamps created by light poet Ingo Maurer are three- dimensional metaphors. They have names like Mozzkito or Wo-Tum-Bu, plays on words that are meant, like the lamps themselves, to break up the monotony of mundane everyday life with a touch of cleverly conceived whimsy. Wo bist Du, Edison, ...? (Where Are You, Edison, ...?) for example consists of a hologram captured in a lampshade. The principle is the apparent bulb within a bulb. This iconic 20th- century idea has become an ongoing theme with Maurer. The career of the ingenious formal inventor, who has achieved the kind of lasting success on the international stage that few others can boast, began in the 1960s. In those days, “good form” was the measure of all things design-wise. Bulb – a bulb within a bulb again – attracted a great deal of attention: a pop object à la Claes Oldenburg with chrome-plated base and crystal shade. Maurer, who went to the USA following studies in graphic art, was strongly influenced by the new art currents there. Back home again, he founded the company Design M, one of the first in Germany to include what is today such an omnipresent Anglicism in its name. Since then Maurer has been designing meta-lamps that not only illuminate their surroundings but also shed light on their own significance. This can be said, for example, of a successful lamp from the 1980s: One From The Heart (k p.27), a heart-shaped floor lamp whose light is reflected back by means of a mirror. In the late 1990s came Zettel‘z, a hanging lamp whose shade is made up of slips of notepaper. Birds Birds Birds, switched on at a touch, was also ahead of its time. Maurer is a master of eliciting the poetry of materials, whether working with layers of silver-coated paper in Oh Mei Ma, goose feathers in the flying light bulb Lucellino (k p. 158) or the wire netting he often uses. While the early lamps tended to be handcrafted, he later began to prefer a high-tech look. Maure r’s great breakthrough came in the mid-1980s with the much-copied low-voltage halogen system YaYaHo, a completely new lighting concept that soon became a classic. Cables traversing the room carry lamps that are reduced to points of light. The nearly immaterialized lighting system seems just as abstract as the “Light Module” from Bega, but at the same time as thoroughly functional as the spotlights produced by Erco. YaYaHo echoes the virtual world of digital networks that have left rigidity and mechanics behind them. Maurer’s product poetry on the highest level represents a style that simply cannot be pigeonholed.