ron arad: beyond boundaries

Paul Knipe reflects on the work of Ron Arad, whose designs and forms have received international acclaim for 30 years, ahead of the Israeli’s first retrospective in the UK at the Barbican.

Ron Arad is always thinking. Thinking and looking, designing and forming. His work is inter-disciplinary and reflective of many genres; he's an architect by trade, but is most famous for his designs, interiors and structural sculpture.

His style and output is difficult to categorise. But then why should it be categorised? Mr Arad shrugs off these kinds of questions. “There’s no discipline. This is what I do,” he says, and heightening the intrigue adds, “so what is it then? Is it art? Is it design?”

To him it’s not about definition, but about the form, the end product. It’s about looking at things with a fresh view, about doing things differently. Yet move away from a focus on genre to oeuvre and themes do emerge. One is practicality and purpose. He’s most famous for his many innovative renditions of the chair type – some of which have now become mass-produced designer objects like the Tom Vac.

But it was his shabby Rover Chair, snapped up by Jean Paul Gaultier in 1981, that gave him international acclaim. Nearly thirty years on his chairs have morphed. From the old car seat set on a squat metal frame, they are now sculpted, organic forms; elongated, elegant, ergonomic. The process is very different but the outcome is the same, relating to his simple outlook on life: “a chair is a container to accommodate,” he tells us. So strikingly simple.

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