Gary Tatintsian Gallery

Gallery Description:

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.

The show in Moscow includes the Pressed Flower series, a collection of pressed FIAT 500 cars, which have been previously exhibited in the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Italy and the Israeli Design Museum Holon; steel furniture and an unique interactive work, The Last Train machine, designed specifically for Ron Arad’s studio.

The Last Train is a digital canvas with a glass surface instead of paper that replicates artist’s movements via an iPad app, “scratching out” future masterpieces using a ring with a cone-shaped diamond. A project turns a precious stone into a symbol of the force of nature rather than an object of luxury. Artists such as Francesco Clemente, Anthony Gormley, Christian Marclay, David Shrigley, Cornelia Parker and many others joined in on the project, creating a collection of unique “sketches”. This new exhibition gives the opportunity for Russian artists to add their works to the collection.

“I was trying to catch the last train from Naples and I arrived on the platform just as the doors had closed. The train stood there for just a brief moment, but I managed to notice a guy in the empty train car doing amazing drawings on the glass with his ring. It reminded me of Picasso’s images of drawing in the air. I didn’t know how to get out of Naples that night, but I felt that the unusual behavior I had witnessed was compensation enough for the missed train.”- Ron Arad

One of the most influential designers and architects of our time, Ron Arad, was born in Tel Aviv in 1951. After graduating from the Academy of Arts in Jerusalem in 1973, he moved to London, where he enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. In his own architectural bureau, Arad 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.