Ron Arad

More Gallery AG, Switzerland
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Deyan Sudjic, Ron Arad, London, 1999, pp. 201-213 for a discussion of this series and other examples of this design
Barry Friedman, Ron Arad: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., New York, 2005, pp. 16-19 for other examples of this design
Paola Antonelli, Ron Arad: No Discipline, exh.cat., New York, 2009, pp. 120-121 for other examples of this design

Israeli-born Ron Arad was born in 1951 and graduated from the Architectural Association in London in 1979. He proceeded to set up his own architecture and industrial design studio, forging himself an unparalleled creative identity and a notorious challenging attitude towards art, design and architecture. Refusing to be fully assimilated with either one of the disciplines, he stated:  `I do not need a passport to go from one to the other`. His `No discipline` exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris was held in 2009 and exemplifies the full panoply of his oeuvre ranging from crude re-appropriated to digitally manufactured elements.

The B.O.O.P. Coffee table (`Blown Out Of Proportion`) is made of inflated aluminium and enamel and was engineered to play a strong visual trick onto the viewer. Through the various production processes of heating, extruding, and vacuum forming aluminium sheets, before assembling and polishing, the piece optically distorts its spatial surroundings. By way of integrating convex additions and concave subtractions to a highly reflective orthogonal shape, the table eludes itself from being a supposedly stable spatial reference point, rather becoming a partly camouflaged piece blending into its surroundings.

Confronting the question of whether he is more a sculptor than a designer Arad replied: ‘It really is not important. I am enjoying discovering the procedures, what can be done with the material, what kind of form to get and the function in this case is purely an alibi. I'm not interested in battering in one aspect or another: say - this is not sculpture! No, this is design- It's not important at all. What matters is: is it interesting, is it boring, is it exciting, looking at it, touching it, giving you a sense of pleasure or not?’