Hella Jongerius ranks among the most influential designers of the past decades. For more than thirty years, she has shaped a new understanding of design as a critical and poetic practice, that continuously questions how we make, use, and care for the things that shape our daily lives. »Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things«, opening on 14 March 2026 at the Vitra Design Museum, will be the first major com-prehensive retrospective of Jongerius’ career. Tracing the full scope of her oeuvre, the exhibition brings together early experimental works, iconic products, and recent sculptural ceramics, offering a profound insight into the fascinating creative universe of Hella Jongerius. Exhibits will include furniture, textiles, ceramics, sketches, prototypes, and films, including numerous projects developed with partners like Maharam, KLM, Camper, IKEA and Vitra, as well as for institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
What does it mean to design in a world that already has enough? How can objects embody appreciation and care rather than consumption and waste? These questions lie at the heart of »Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things«. The exhibition follows Jongerius’ evolution, from her beginnings in the Dutch avant garde group Droog Design in the 1990s, through her rise in the 2000s as a successful product and textile designer, to the deeply personal works of recent years that challenge the boundaries between design and art. Over multiple phases of her career, Jongerius has developed a distinct design language marked by complexity and an aesthetic of collage and layering, in which the diversity of materials is as essential as the expressive power of the handmade and the imperfect.
Highlights of the exhibition will include iconic designs such as the Pushed Washtub (1996), Polder Sofa (2005) and an impressive installation of around three hundred Coloured Vases (2010), alongside experimental works such as the Inflatable Textiles (1993), Woven Movie (2017), and Angry Animals (2021 to present). Most works in the exhibition are drawn from Jongerius’ extensive archive, acquired by the museum in 2024. This archive comprises not only objects and prototypes but also a wealth of prototypes, experiments, original sketches, and other documents. Thanks to this material, the exhibition can draw on a previously unseen abundance of works and highlight how Jongerius uses her archive as a resource for ideas, research, and experimentation.
| Hours | 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM |
| Venue | Vitra Design Museum |
| Type | Exhibition |
| Duration | 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM |
| City | Weil am Rhein |
About
Vitra Design Museum
The Vitra Design Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, numbers among the world's leading museums of design. It is dedicated to the research and presentation of design, past and present, and examines design's relationship to architecture, art and everyday culture. The work of the Vitra Design Museum is based on its collection, which includes not only key objects of design history, but also the estates of several important design personalities. The museum library and document archive are available to researchers upon request. The museum conceives its exhibitions for touring, and they are shown at venues around the world. On the Vitra Campus, they are complemented by a diverse program of events, guided tours, and workshops.
