Ron Arad’s Unconstrained Objects and the Mind Behind Them
“What happens if you have a ping-pong table that is not straight, that has a curve?” Designer Ron Arad never runs out of ideas that push through existing forms, shapes and concepts. “I never follow instructions. If you can have a career that doesn’t rely on you following conventions or instructions, you are very lucky. And I consider myself lucky,” he tells Observer. But it’s more than luck—a mastermind full of imagination that never surrenders is what Arad offers to the world of design and to the people who have the pleasure of living with his work.
Arad is among the most prominent artists and designers of our time. This June, he was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to art and design in the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours List. One of his signature interior pieces is the Glider, designed for Moroso, an Italian furniture company. It looks like a solid, heavy piece—just a lump. In contrast to the stereotype that modern design is a pure play of forms and technologies with no regard for function, Arad’s works achieve an incredible level of comfort without compromising artistic innovation. Despite its heavy appearance, the Glider is flexible and comfortable thanks to carefully designed mechanisms hidden inside. It can bounce up and down like a cushion and move to the front and back, like an American porch glider, which Arad himself enjoys playing with.
“Form and functions are not enemies. They are good friends, they support each other,” Arad explains. “I’m talking here, sitting on a chair I’ve designed. It’s the most comfortable chair to be interviewed on. If something doesn’t seem comfortable but you realize how wrong you were when you sit on it, it is a good surprise that breaks the expectation. It would be much worse if the opposite happens.” When his metal furniture piece The Well Tempered Chair was on show in London, people were scared and had to think twice before they dared to try it. “When they came and sat on it, they all said the same thing, as if someone had written a script for them: ‘Actually, it’s very comfortable.’” Part of the beauty of Arad’s design lies in the play of such expectations and the unpredictable ways in which one may interact with the object.
After a few iterations on the overstuffed chair, Arad took the idea further and used a tree trunk instead. The seat itself was carved by a CNC milling machine, allowing him to inscribe whatever he wanted on it. He chose a line from William Morris, the 19th-century British textile designer and poet closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Yet even that classic dictate felt restrictive. “For me, even this is too many instructions, so I added ‘, or love.’” This quote can lead to a full conversation about materials and technology: “The more sophisticated the technology gets, the less technological the object looks… Oh, and the sentence was in my handwriting.”
Arad’s first furniture work was the Rover Chair. At the time, what interested him was not the history of furniture but ready-made art like Marcel Duchamp’s. “I discovered that Jean Prouvé did a copy of my chair before I was even born. He copied me!” he exclaims. When he started designing furniture, he had the idea of bending and welding metal to make it hollow—what he calls “volume pieces.” The Big Easy is one of the first pieces he completed from his early drawings, its shape a paraphrase or satirical version of an overstuffed armchair.
“I thought: why should everything be perfect? I learned to weld on this, so of course it was rough and crude. The lyrics go, ‘Why should everything be perfect?’ So why not make a piece of furniture that can be as free as a painting?” Later his techniques improved and the objects became perfect. “Now all you have to do is to change the lyrics and say, ‘Why can’t a piece of furniture be as perfect?’ Why can’t it be jewelry-like?”
“Big Easy” is New Orleans’s nickname, and Arad made a series called New Orleans for the Big Easy chairs in different colors. “It’s not painting a chair, but rather it’s making it out of the paint,” he explained. The colors and patterns are reminiscent of abstract expressionism, and the texts on these chairs are iconic of Arad’s humor: “Not to be auctioned”—of course it was auctioned; “Absolutely not for sale”—of course it was sold; “Only one point of view”—one can’t see the sentence when moving left or right. Arad also has a marble piece called Not Carved in Stone, which of course was carved in stone. There, he engraved a quote from Oscar Wilde: “A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy.”
These plays on words and deceptively simple facades often obscures how time-consuming it is to create such objects. One version of the Big Easy was made with the idea of revealing the molecules of the piece, as if viewed under a microscope. The two pieces as a set are identical, but one is negative and the other positive. It was a painstaking journey to complete with such precision: when Sotheby’s requested a photograph for a catalogue, Arad could not meet the deadline. He offered to make a render, “but then I was late, not by a week, not by a month, but by a whole year! It took me a year longer to make. It was very difficult.”
Such flexibility around time can be a privilege in the world of design. For Arad, designing for industry and for art galleries is governed by different parameters. “When you work for the industry, you know the cost of production is important. It is a product that needs to be consumed by certain people,” he explains. “But when you do handmade studio pieces, the constraints and destinations are different. What I’m showing here can’t be done for IKEA.”
Nonetheless, what starts as a studio piece can sometimes find its way into industrial production. When the Big Easy was taken to a show in Milan, Moroso requested to industrialize the chair. “And I said, only if you make a whole collection, I don’t want to give you just this.” The Big Easy holds a special place in his creative life: “Every time I had a new idea for a new process or material, the Big Easy jumped to the front and said, ‘Use me!’ So it became an icon in my life. Michael Jackson even used it without my permission in his music video.”
In addition to his celebrated career as an architectural and interior designer, Arad long served as a professor—perhaps one of the most defiant ones—at the Royal College of Art in London, where he took an equally unconstrained approach to education. Whenever professors select students based on their portfolios for interview shortlists, he always looked at the rejects. “I have taken perfectly employable people to the course, and after two years, they become unemployable,” he smiles. It got to a point where the college administration grew concerned. “But they shouldn’t worry.”
One of the assignments he gave students was to design a new musical instrument for Yamaha. A student he had admitted from the initial rejection pile designed a silicone keyboard capable of playing vibrato, an innovation that would later became a business. “I have lots of examples of ex-students who, instead of being employed, started their businesses and employed some sixty people.”
A question artists face constantly—and one of the most frequently asked of Arad—is where ideas come from. In his philosophy, ideas are not the problem. The problem is choosing which ones to identify, invest in or let go. “My answer to that always is, if I have an idea, I close my eyes and imagine: If I’d seen it done by someone else in a gallery, would I be jealous? If the answer is yes, then I’ll do it,” he says.
“Boredom is the mother of creativity, jealousy is the stepfather.” This is the line he inscribed in his new work, Eye Test, along with quotes by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Oscar Wilde. “I’m not jealous,” he clarifies. “‘I wish’ is probably a better word, though I’m very jealous of dancers. When I watch amazing dancers, I have positive jealousy—that is a good word.”
Arad’s unwavering curiosity seems increasingly rare in a world where artists face unprecedented challenges posed by new technologies, yet he is not entirely afraid. “The weaving industry was the first to use computers, before the car industry. It is amazing when I did a sketch and used technology to translate it into textiles. It was better than what I deserve. It’s exciting, but in a different way.” He believes technology is like a fist—a tool that can do good or bad things. “Are we scared of our hands? Sometimes we are. It is dangerous, but let’s be optimistic and look at the good things about it.”
In 2008/9, the Centre Pompidou and MoMA held Arad’s major retrospective titled “No Discipline,” which characterizes his approach to art. “I don’t have an exclusive membership of any discipline, and I’m not interested in having one. When I do something, I have to be curious and interested in it, and couldn’t care less if some reviewers in a newspaper think it is art or design. It’s your business, not mine.”
Arad often quotes Oscar Wilde’s famous line: “Art is not functional.” Wilde also says, “People are either charming or tedious.” Arad says the same about objects: “There are boring, tedious objects, and there are exciting, charming objects.” Making charming objects is what matters most to him.
As an artist who thrives on creative freedom, Arad considers himself extremely lucky. “I’m very lucky that I can continue doing the same thing I did when I was a child. When I grew up and studied, it was all about satisfying one’s curiosity: What happens if you do this? What happens if you don’t do this? I never want to follow instructions.” One of the typical questions people ask after interviews or lectures is what advice he’d give to a young artist or designer. “And my answer always is, don’t listen to advice—not even mine.”
More in Artists
