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Practical pieces: the American map bookshelf called Oh the Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends, 2008
As you enter this exhibition of furniture-as-sculpture, from the legendary London-based designer Ron Arad, you may feel you have suddenly entered a freeze frame from the climax of Terminator 2. It’s the bit when the liquid metal android reforms itself from those silver globules on the floor.
Chaise-longue-type chairs, with immaculate mirrored surfaces of highly polished aluminium, some stamped with patterns of holes, are positioned across the gallery. Several of them have been up-ended, and look like strange Henry Moore figures rising up. They were first drawn by hand but the complexity of the curved forms and undulating surfaces suggests the latest 3D modelling software and they were fabricated by a company that makes aeroplane parts.
Other chairs — one looking like a crumpled wizard’s hat, another like a giant thumbprint — are covered in coils of metal, like rope.
They are incredibly well engineered: all swivel and pivot like rocking chairs balancing on a pin head and, if you ask nicely, the gallery might let you try one.
Against one wall is an enormous shelving unit, made from stainless steel in the shape of the map of America. The outline of each state forms its own “shelf’”, leading to many jokes in the arty blogosphere about the unusually large number of books that one might now find in America’s second largest state, Texas.
Arad, now 58, teaches design at the Royal College of Art in London and has been making sculptural furniture for three decades. One of his best-known early pieces consisted of two leather chairs taken from an old Rover P2 and welded into a metal frame as a sofa. He’s just had a show at the Pompidou in France and has another one opening later this year at MOMA in New York.
His new works come in editions of three or six, and cost more than half a million quid each. But are they really art, or furniture for art collectors? They certainly display the shininess popular with billionaire collectors of Hirst and Koons. An unkind critic might condemn them as Anish Kapoors you can sit on. But Arad’s combination of bodily shapes and advanced technology has the quality of a great science fiction novel and if they are just for sitting on, it’s the most aesthetic experience your bottom will ever have.
Until 9 May. Information:
www.timothytaylorgallery.com.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
