Designer Ron Arad will present new work at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London next week.

The Thumbprint chair (top image) is made of bronze rods, while the series of Bodyguards (above) are made of inflated aerospace aluminium.

Above: Oh the Framer and the Cowman Should be Friends. The show opens on Wednesday next week and continues until 9 May.

The information below is from Timothy Taylor Gallery:

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Ron Arad
New Works

8 April – 9 May 2009

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new works by Ron Arad. This marks the first show at the gallery since it announced sole representation of Arad in the UK.

Grouped around a freestanding star of interconnected walls designed by Arad, the show will unveil a number of highly sophisticated experimental pieces, many only recently produced and on display for the first time.

Arad’s re-invention of the chair is constantly evolving; the Thumbprint, composed of multiple bronze rods, and the Rod Gomli, of stainless steel rods, are jewel-like objects that shimmer as the light shifts, revealing subtle gradations of colour. The first in editions of six, they are imposing yet intricate pieces – their seductive contours inviting the viewer to touch, explore and climb into the curved centres they create.

In addition to the Thumbprint, there will be a series of three unique Bodyguards. Crafted from inflated aerospace aluminium, cut individually, highly polished and tinted, they will be shown alongside four new and unique Drunk Bodyguards. These remarkable sculptural pieces sway woozily on a single tangent point, balancing, poised in mid-air, reacting to the lightest of touches. They appear to be weightless. Paradoxically this weightlessness is the result of extreme heaviness.

Exploring similar paradoxes, the woven pieces, Gomlis and Johnny Wasps, are deceptively strong yet light in structure. Composite techno-threads are woven around sacrificial moulds. Colourful, tribal and dotted with latticed holes, they hold the body as if in an airy web.

Arad’s most recent and critically acclaimed solo show, No Discipline, is currently on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, until 16 March 2009, displaying over 100 pieces in a specially created scenography. Arad will open a re-defined version of this exhibitionat the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 2 August - 19 October 2009 before reconfiguring it in turn for the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in the autumn of 2010.

Arad was born in Tel Aviv in 1951 and studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and at the Architectural Association in London. He was appointed Professor of Product Design at the Royal College of Art in London in 1997. Before and After Now, a major retrospective of Arad’s work was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2000, a year after the publication of a monograph by Deyan Sudjic, now Director of London’s Design Museum. In 2004 Ron Arad Talks To Matthew Collings was published by Phaidon. Arad’s Architectural projects include the Maserati headquarters showroom in Modena, Italy, and Y’s fashion store for Yohji Yamamoto in Tokyo, Japan, which opened in 2003. In 2004 he began work on the design of Magis’s headquarters in Treviso, Italy and the Holon Design Museum in Israel, now completed. In the same year, he participated in the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

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