Ron Arad (1951, Tel Aviv, Israel). Lives and works in London.

Ron Arad is often called the Man of steel, while his provocative conceptual works are often deemed actual objects of the future. From a young age, Ron Arad has been avoiding the typical architectural canons and clichés and experimenting with different shapes and materials. Sheet metal is his trademark. For 30 years, artist has been working with steel, aluminum and polyamide, embodying the colorful and unique style in a variety of works of art, ranging from furniture to futuristic architectural spaces. Despite the weight of the material, Arad’s works are always elegant and combine a voluminous lightness with flowing lines and flexible forms.

After graduating from the Academy of Arts in Jerusalem in 1973, Arad moved to London, where he enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. In his own architectural bureau, he created his first art works from industrial waste and construction material. Arad’s continuous experiments with the limits and possibilities of materials, from the choice of metal to the choice of composition as a whole, and his completely new, radical ideas about the shape and structure of objects and buildings make him a central figure in the world of contemporary culture.

His architectural projects include an opera house complex in Tel Aviv, the boutique of fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto in Tokyo, a new design museum in Israel and exclusive residences and hotels around the world.

Ron Arad’s public sculptures include: ‘Big Blue’ in Canary Wharf (London), ‘Evergreen!’ (Tokyo), ‘Kesher’ (Tel Aviv), and ‘Vortext’ (Seoul). In 2016, a mobile 16-meter ‘Spyre’ sculpture graced the entrance to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Selected public collections:
Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal, Canada
Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
Fond National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France
Centre National d’Art Plastique, Paris, France
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK
Design Museum, London, UK
Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Rohsska Design Museum, Gothenburg, Sweden
Powerhouse, Sydney, Australia
Design Museum, Osaka, Japan
Design Museum, Nürnberg, Germany
Neue Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany