“What happens if you have a ping pong table that is not straight, and has a curve?” Designer Ron Arad never runs out of ideas that push existing shapes, forms and concepts. “I never follow instructions. If you can have a career that doesn’t depend on following conventions or instructions, you’re very lucky. I consider myself lucky,” he told the Observer. But it’s more than just luck – a mastermind full of imagination that never gives up is what Arad brings to the world of design and to the people who enjoy living with his work.
Arad is one of the most prominent artists and designers of our time. In June this year, he was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to art and design in the King’s Birthday Honors List 2026. One of his signature interior pieces is gliderdesigned for Moroso, an Italian furniture company. It looks like a solid, heavy piece, just a block. In contrast to the stereotype that modern design is a mere play of forms and techniques without any regard for function, Arad’s works achieve an incredible level of comfort without compromising on artistic innovation. Despite its heavy appearance, the glider is flexible and comfortable thanks to carefully designed mechanisms hidden inside. It can jump up and down like a pillow and move back and forth, like an American glider, which Arad himself enjoys playing with.
“Form and function are not enemies. They are good friends, they support each other,” Arad explains. “I’m talking here, sitting in a chair I designed. It’s the most comfortable chair to interview in. If something doesn’t look comfortable but you realize how wrong you were when you sat in it, that’s a nice surprise that breaks expectations. It would be much worse if the opposite happened.” When his metal piece of furniture Good mood chair It was shown in London, and people were afraid 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 on such expectations and the unexpected ways in which one might interact with the object.
After several iterations on the stuffed 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 engrave whatever he wanted on it. He chose a phrase from William Morris, the 19th-century British textile designer and poet closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement: “Put nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or think to be beautiful.” However, even these classical dictates seemed restrictive. “For me, even that’s too much instruction, so I added, ‘or love.’ This quote could spark an entire conversation about materials and technology: “The more complex technology becomes, the less technological the object seems… Oh, and the sentence was in my own handwriting.”
Arad’s first furniture work was the Rover Chair. At that time, what interested him was not the history of furniture, but rather ready-made art such as the works of Marcel Duchamp. “I discovered that Jean Prouvé had made a copy of my chair before I was born. He had copied me!” He shouts. When he started designing furniture, he had the idea of bending and welding metal to make it hollow, which he calls “volumetric pieces.” The Big Easy is one of the first pieces he completed from his early drawings, and its form is a reworking or satirical version of an overstuffed armchair.
“I thought: ‘Why does everything have to be perfect?’ I learned to weld on this, so of course it was rough and rough. The lyrics say: ‘Why does everything have to be perfect?’ So why not make a piece of furniture that can be as free as a painting?” Later his techniques improved and things became perfect. “Now all you have to do is change the words and say, ‘Why can’t a piece of furniture be perfect?’ Why can’t it be like jewelry?
“Big Easy” is a nickname for New Orleans, and Arad made a series called New Orleans for Great plain Chairs in different colours. “It’s not about painting a chair, it’s about getting it out of the paint,” he explained. The colors and patterns are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism, and the texts on these chairs are emblematic of Arad’s sense of humor: “They shall not be auctioned” – of course they were auctioned off; “Not for sale at all”—it was sold, of course; “One point of view only” – one cannot see the sentence when moving left or right. There is also a marble piece in Arad called Not carved in stoneWhich was of course engraved in stone. There, he inscribed a quote from Oscar Wilde: “A work of art is as useless as a flower is useless. A flower blooms for its own delight.”
These wordplays and deceptively simple interfaces often obscure how time-consuming such things are. One copy of Great plain It was created with the idea of revealing the particles of the piece, as if they were under a microscope. The two pieces as a set are identical, but one is negative and the other is positive. It was an arduous journey to complete it with such precision: when Sotheby’s requested a photograph for the catalogue, Arad was unable to meet the deadline. “But then I was late,” he offered, “not by a week, not by a month, but by a whole year! It took me a year longer to do it. It was very difficult.”
Such flexibility over time can be a privilege in the world of design. For Arad, design for industry and art galleries is subject to different standards. “When you work in industry, you know that the cost of production is important. It is a product that has to be consumed by certain people,” he explains. “But when you make handcrafted studio pieces, the constraints and destinations are different. What I’m showing here couldn’t be done for IKEA.”
However, what begins as a studio piece can sometimes find its way into industrial production. when Great plain It was taken to a show in Milan, and Moroso commissioned the chair to be made. “And I said, ‘Only if you make a whole set, I don’t want to just give you this.’ the Great plain He occupies a special place in his creative life: “Every time I had a new idea for a new process or material, it was… Great plain He jumped forward and said, “Use me!” So you 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 worked for a long time as a professor – perhaps one of the most challenging professors – at the Royal College of Art in London, where he took an equally uninhibited approach to teaching. When professors select students based on their portfolios for interview shortlists, they always look at rejected students. “I took employable people on the course, and after two years, they were unemployed,” he smiles. It has reached a point where the college administration has become worried. “But they shouldn’t worry.”
One of the students’ assignments was to design a new musical instrument for Yamaha. One student, who was recognized among the group of initial rejections, designed a silicone keyboard capable of triggering vibrations, an innovation that later became a business. “I have a lot of examples of former students who, instead of getting a job, started their own business and employed about sixty people.”
A question artists constantly face – and one of the most common questions Arad asks – is where ideas come from. In his philosophy, ideas are not the problem. The problem is choosing which ones to select, invest in or give up. “My answer to that is always, if I have an idea, I close my eyes and imagine: If I saw it by someone else in a gallery, would I be jealous? If yes, I would do it,” he says.
“Boredom is the mother of creativity, and jealousy is the stepfather.” This is the line he wrote in his new work, Eye testas well as quotes by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, and Oscar Wilde. “I’m not jealous,” he explains. “Maybe ‘I wish’ would be a better word, although I’m very jealous of dancers. When I see great dancers, I get a positive jealousy – and that’s 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 textile industry was the first to use computers, before the automobile industry. It’s amazing when I made a drawing and used technology to translate it into textiles. It was better than I deserved. It’s exciting, but in a different way.” He believes that technology is like the fist, a tool that can do good or bad things. “Are we afraid of our own hands? Sometimes we are. It’s dangerous, but let’s be optimistic and look at the good things in this.”
In 2008/2009, the Center Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective of Arad entitled “No Discipline”, which characterizes his approach to art. “I don’t have an exclusive membership in any discipline, and I’m not interested in having one. When I do something, I have to be curious and interested in it, and I couldn’t care less if some reviewer in a newspaper thinks it’s art or design. It’s your job, not mine.”
Arad often quotes Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase: “Art is not functional.” Wilde also says: “People are either charming or boring.” Arad says the same thing about objects: “There are things that are dull and boring, and there are things that are exciting and glamorous.” Making magical things 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 keep doing the same thing I did when I was a kid. 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 to give to a young artist or designer. “And my answer is always: Don’t listen to advice, not even mine.”
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