“What happens when you have a non-straight, curved ping-pong table?” Designer Ron Arad never runs out of ideas that go beyond existing forms, shapes and concepts. “I never follow instructions. If you can have a job that doesn't depend on following rules or instructions, you're very lucky. And I consider myself lucky,” he told the Observer. But it's more than luck—a genius full of imagination that never gives up is what Aradi offers to the world of design and to the people who enjoy his life and work.
Arad is among the most prominent artists and designers of our time. In 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 Honors List. One of his signature interior pieces is the The Gliderdesigned for Moroso, an Italian furniture company. It looks like a solid, heavy piece—just a lump. Contrary to the belief that modern design is a pure play of forms and technology that does not care about function, Arad's works achieve a remarkable level of luxury without compromising artistic innovation. Despite its tough appearance, the Glider is flexible and comfortable thanks to the carefully designed mechanisms hidden inside. It can bounce up and down like a pillow and forward and backward, like an American airplane on the balcony, which Aradi himself enjoys playing with.
“Form and functions are not enemies. They are best friends, they support each other,” explained Arad. “I'm talking here, sitting in the chair I designed. It's a very comfortable chair to talk on. If something goes wrong but you realize how wrong you were when you were sitting on it, it's a beautiful miracle that ends hope. It would be worse if the opposite happened. When his piece of metal furniture Cool Seat was shown in London, 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 Aradi's design is based on playing with expectations and the unexpected ways one might encounter an object.
After a few iterations on an overstuffed chair, Arad took the idea a step further and used a tree trunk instead. The chair itself was carved by a CNC milling machine, which allowed him to write whatever he wanted on it. She 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 know is useful or that you believe to be beautiful.” Yet even those old rules felt restrictive. “For me, even this is too much guidance, so I added ', or love.'” This quote can lead to a whole discussion about materials and technology: “The more complex the technology becomes, the more the thing looks like technology… Oh, and the sentence was written by my hand.”
Arad's first furniture project was the Rover Chair. At that time, what interested him was not the history of furniture but the art of the ready-made like Marcel Duchamp. I found out that Jean Prouvé made a copy of my chair before I was born. he exclaimed. When he started designing furniture, he had the idea of bending and welding metal to make it hollow—what he called “volume pieces.” The Big Easy is one of the first pieces he completed from his original drawings, its design is a version of an armchair or a mock version of an overstuffed armchair.
“I thought: why does everything have to be perfect? I learned to weld in this, so it was hard and raw. The welders would say, 'Why does everything have to be perfect?' So why not make furniture that can be free like painting?” Later his techniques improved and things became perfect. “Now all you have to do is change the words and say, 'Why is the furniture flawless?' Why can't it be like jewelry?”
“Big Easy” is the nickname of New Orleans, and Arad made a series called New Orleans for the Big Easy chairs in different colors. “It's not painting a chair, but it makes it come out with paint,” he explained. The colors and patterns are reminiscent of abstract expressionism, and the inscriptions on these chairs are a reflection of Arad's humor: “Not to be sold”—it was indeed auctioned; “Not for sale at all”—yes, it was sold; “Only one view”—one cannot see a sentence when going left or right. Aradi also has a piece of marble called It is not carved in stonethe truth is that it was carved in stone. There, he recorded a quote from Oscar Wilde: “A work of art is as useless as a flower is useless.”
This play on words and deceptively simple facades often hide how time-consuming it is to create such things. One version of the Big Easy it is done with the idea of revealing the cells of the piece, as if viewed through a microscope. Two pieces as a set are identical, but one is negative and the other is positive. It was a difficult journey to complete with such precision: when Sotheby's requested a catalog image, Arad could not meet the deadline. He asked to translate it, “but then I was late, not for a week, not for a month, but for a whole year!”
Such flexibility over time can be a privilege in the world of design. In Aradi, industrial design and art gallery are governed by different boundaries. “If you work in an industry, you know that production costs are important, it is a product that needs to be consumed by certain people,” he explained. “But when you make handmade studio pieces, the limits and destinations are different. What I'm showing here is not going to be made for IKEA.”
However, what starts as a studio clip can sometimes find its way into industrial production. When the Big Easy was taken to an exhibition in Milan, Moroso asked to industrialize the chair. “And I said, only if you make a whole collection, I don't want to give you just this.” I Big Easy has a special place in his creative life: “Every time I have a new idea for a new process or material, Big Easy he jumped forward and said, 'Use me!' So it became a sign in my life. Michael Jackson even used it without my permission in his music video.”
In addition to his famous career as an architect and interior designer, Arad served a long tenure as a professor—perhaps one of the most despised—at the Royal College of Art in London, where he took an egalitarian approach to education. Whenever professors selected students based on their portfolios for short-list interviews, he always faced rejection. “I've taken people who are completely unemployable to do this course, and after two years, they end up no longer working,” he smiles. It got to the point where the college management got worried. “But they shouldn't worry.”
One of the assignments he gave the students was to design a new Yamaha musical instrument. A student he accepted from the first pile of rejections designed a silicone keyboard capable of playing vibrato, an innovation that would later become a business. “I have many examples of students who were students who instead of being employed started their own businesses and employed sixty people.”
A question artists often face—and one of the most frequently asked questions about Aradi—is where ideas come from. In his philosophy, ideas are not the problem. The problem is choosing which ones to target, invest in or let go of. “My answer to that is always, when I have an idea, I close my eyes and think: If I saw it done by someone else in a gallery, would I be jealous? If the answer is yes, I will,” he says.
“Boredom is a creative mother, envy is a stepfather.” This is the line he wrote in his new work, Eye Examinationand quotes by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Oscar Wilde. “I'm not jealous,” he clarifies. “'I wish' is probably a better word, although I do get very jealous of dancers.” When I look at amazing dancers, I get downright jealous—that's a good word.”
Arad's unwavering curiosity seems rare in a world where artists face unprecedented challenges posed by new technologies, but he's not entirely fearless. “The knitting industry was the first to use computers before the car industry, it's amazing when I make a drawing using technology to turn it into fabric, it was better than I deserved, it's fun but in a different way.” He believes that technology is like a fist—a tool that can do good or bad things. “Are we afraid of our hands? Sometimes we are. It's dangerous, but let's be positive and look for the good in it.”
In 2008/9, the Center Pompidou and MoMA held a major retrospective of Arad entitled “No Discipline,” which showcased his artistic approach. “I have no exclusive membership of any discipline, and I have no interest in having one. When I do something, I have to be curious and interested in it, and I don't care if some reviewers in the newspaper think it's art or design. It's your business, not mine.”
Arad often quotes Oscar Wilde's famous line: “Art does not work.” Wilde also says, “People are either interesting or annoying.” Arad says the same about things: “There are things that are dull, boring, and there are things that are exciting and attractive.” Making things attractive is what is most important to him.
As an artist who thrives on creative freedom, Aradi considers herself very fortunate. “I'm very lucky that I can continue to do what I did as a kid. When I grew up and learned, it was about satisfying human curiosity: What happens if you do this? What happens if you don't do this? I never want to follow instructions.” One of the most common questions people ask after interviews or talks is what advice they would give a young artist or designer. “And my answer is always, don't listen to advice—even my own.”
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