Recommended by Ron Arad RA
World famous Israeli architect and designer Ron Arad was awarded the Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) in recognition of his “sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry” in 2002. He was Professor of Design Product at the Royal College of Art in London from 1997 until 2009. Ron Arad was awarded the 2011 London Design Week Medal for design excellence. He was elected as a Royal Academician in 2013.
His art works have been exhibited at the Roundhouse London, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Pinacotteca Agnelli, Torino, New York’s MOMA, Barbican Centre in London, as well as the Design Museum Holon, which he himself designed.
Architectural projects include the foyer at the Tel Aviv Opera House (1994), Hotel Puerta America, Madrid (2005), Hotel Duomo, Rimini (2006), Mediacite shopping centre in Liege, Belgium (2009), and the award-winning Design Museum Holon, Israel (2010).
What is your favourite art space to visit? Somewhere you have been that had brought you joy.
I feel a personal connection with the Roundhouse. You couldn’t be more pluralistic in content, (and therefore audiences), than the Roundhouse. It’s the closest art and performance venue to my studio and I play a game at the end of a working day when I leave the studio, to guess by the look of the people in the queue who is performing that night. The Roundhouse was also my favourite space to do an installation (Curtain Call; 2011, 2016).
What have you seen in the past year (2019) which made you think you are looking at a new way of experiencing art? This can be an artwork, an exhibition, or a space.
I like how contemporary artists have inhabited the hoarding space of Freud’s house in Hempstead.
What show, gallery, institution or museum have you visited that you thought was worth the travel?
The Barbican Centre. It’s the fact that it includes so many arts in one architectural complex in such an urban, central location. music, theatre, visual, literary, and food of course.
In your opinion, which city, other than London, Berlin or New York, has a really interesting and exciting art scene?
Tel Aviv. it has the intensity that you often find in the periphery and that is less common in the centre. It is a bubble in a region where arts and culture are definitely not the first priority.
If the world were coming to an end, and there was space for only one museum collection on the spaceship, which collection would you nominate and why?
The Google archive.