10 beautiful, unexpected, and downright weird takes on the lamp

Designers love to experiment, but there’s one particular object where they tend to get especially creative and even weird: lighting.

Picture a ceramic lamp sculpted into a car, a fixture and shade cast in metal swirls, and something that looks like a cork UFO. These out-of-the-box designs are part of a new exhibition during New York’s Design Week showing the unusual territory where designers are taking lighting.

Now in its sixth edition, the Head Hi Lamp Show brings together 36 eccentric lamps from designers located around the world. It is organized by Alexandra Hodkowski and Alvaro Alcocer, the founders of Head Hi, an architecture bookstore and cafe in Brooklyn. This year they brought in Stephen Markos, founder of the design gallery Superhouse, to curate the show.

“The exhibition celebrates our universal relationship to light, design and creative expression and, more specifically, objects that have the ability to change our spatial understanding, to tone our immediate atmosphere,” the organizers said in a news release.

The lamps on view all function, but they celebrate creativity and form above all. The lineup also includes a lamp composed of a red metal frame draped with a sky print fabric as its shade by the Malaysian designer Jun Ong, a paper sconce printed with a figurative graphic by the San Francisco–based practice Studio Ahead, and a totemic marble piece by the Venetian artist Giacomo Bianco.

The show is on view at Head Hi and online from May 18 through October. All the lamps are available for sale, too.

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