NEW YORK, NY.- Paul Kasmin Gallery announces its representation of Ron Arad. For the first time in the United States, the gallery presents In Reverse, an exhibition of the artist’s recent metal works from February 12 – March 14, 2015 at 515 West 27th Street, New York.
In Reverse was first installed at the Design Museum Holon, Israel—the iconic building which Arad designed himself—and later travel to the Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino, Italy in 2014. The exhibition examines the ongoing dialogue between handmade and digital processes in his practice. Rather than manipulate materials to generate functionality, Arad reverses their utilitarian purpose and transforms them into one-of-a-kind objects.
Comprised of six of Arad’s “Pressed Flower” sculptures made up of compressed Fiat 500s in varying colors mounted on the gallery’s walls, In Reverse also illustrates Arad’s long-standing fascination with crushed metals which he continues to collect in the form of soda cans or toys destroyed by oncoming traffic. For Arad, these crushed car sculptures are “the nearest thing you could do in three-dimensions to action painting.” Even the Fiat itself retains iconographic importance to Arad; the Fiat Topolino 500c Giardiniera was his family’s first car, and as a child, his father nearly died in an accident in the vehicle.
The exhibition also features Blame the Tools (2013), a to-scale, digitally grided 3D model of a Fiat in steel and bronze. In Reverse continues to highlight Arad’s exploration of material, form and function over the last thirty years with an earlier work, Restless (2007), a gravity-defying bronze bookcase. This functional piece simultaneously overlaps convex and concave surfaces to create a seemingly impossible balance that appears effortless.
Ron Arad (British, b. Israel 1951) stands out for his daredevil curiosity about form, structure, technology, materials and for the versatile nature of his work, which spans industrial design, hand-crafted studio pieces, sculpture, architecture, and mixed media installations. In 2013 Arad was elected as a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Art in London and the first major retrospective of his work titled No Discipline, debuted in 2008 at the Pompidou Centre followed by the Museum of Modern Art in 2009.
