GRAU and Yngve Holen: Light Becomes an Alien Object

With Alien, GRAU opens a new chapter in its design journey, introducing its first Artist Edition created in collaboration with Norwegian-German artist Yngve Holen. More than a simple partnership between a brand and an artist, the project inhabits an increasingly hybrid territory between collectible design, installation, and contemporary research, where light ceases to be merely functional and becomes a narrative presence, a speculative object, and a perceptual device.

Founded by Tobias Grau and now led by Timon and Melchior Grau, the German lighting company has progressively transformed its language, moving away from a purely technical vision of lighting toward a more atmospheric and emotional approach, where light is conceived as a sensory and cultural experience. 
This evolution is also reflected in the opening of the brand’s new Berlin flagship store at Savignyplatz, inaugurated last March in the heart of Charlottenburg: a space conceived as an immersive destination dedicated to light, where architecture, materials, and luminous atmospheres create an experience closer to a gallery or cultural environment than to a traditional showroom. 

Alongside its more experimental research, GRAU continues to develop a refined exploration of product and atmospheric perception, as demonstrated by Dune, the new chromatic palette introduced for the Parrot and Fire lighting collections. 

Inspired by the reflections created when sunlight meets sand, the finish introduces mineral tones between beige and gold, emphasizing the relationship between light, surface, and material while reinforcing the brand’s increasingly sensory and almost landscape-oriented approach to lighting. The new Artist Editions emerge precisely from this transformation, inviting artists to engage freely with the medium of light through experimental limited editions.

For this first project, GRAU selected Yngve Holen, an artist internationally recognized for a sculptural practice that explores the relationship between body, technology, industry, and contemporary material culture. Exhibited in institutions and galleries such as Kunsthalle Basel, Galerie Neu, X Museum in Beijing, and Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, Holen’s work examines industrial objects as contemporary organisms, often dismantled, dissected, and transformed into hybrid presences between anatomy and machine. This tension also runs through Alien, a sculptural lamp produced in a limited edition of 200 pieces, built around a UV-reactive fluorescent blown-glass core mounted on a polished aluminum structure. Its form derives from a high-resolution 3D scan of a moldavite, a glass-like stone generated approximately 15 million years ago by a meteorite impact in what is now southern Germany.

The object appears as an extraterrestrial fragment suspended between archaeological relic, industrial artifact, and living organism — a luminous presence seemingly arriving from a remote past or an undefined future.
In Holen’s practice, objects are never neutral: cars, tires, animal carcasses, industrial components, and technological devices are constantly manipulated and recontextualized to reveal the invisible tensions of contemporary society. Alien belongs to this same research, but does so through a more rarefied and perceptual language, where light introduces an almost spiritual dimension while maintaining the ambiguous and unsettling quality that characterizes the artist’s work.

In this sense, the collaboration with GRAU reflects a broader transformation currently shaping contemporary design: the gradual dissolution of boundaries between art, product, and installation. The lamp is no longer understood solely as a functional or decorative element, but as a cultural and narrative medium capable of constructing imaginaries and activating emotional relationships.