‘Boredom Is The Mother Of Creativity’: Ron Arad on four decades of making

A piece of furniture, Ron Arad says, isn't only finished when you finish it but also when people are using it and enjoying it. It's this kind of unique philosophy that underpins Ron Arad's practice, the belief that objects take on a new version of themselves in other people's hands. Speaking to New Wave from his Camden studio, Arad scrolls through decades of his work on a shared screen, his eagerness in doing so matched by his determination for a viewer to understand the full breadth of what he's made.

The first point Arad makes about his work comes from his desire to correct a misconception, when asked about his choice to primarily work with industrial materials like steel, he doesn’t hesitate to answer that “all materials” be they steel, colours, or even technology, are “just tools” for an artist.

He seems, however, to have a continued affinity for steel – tried and trusted, he describes it as a “forgiving material” which can be bent, cut, welded, and have its colour changed. To demonstrate just how forgiving steel can truly be, he pulls out an image of his Tinker chair – “I hammered it,” he says, “until it confessed it was a chair’’. Imposing and expressive, the chair is proof that a material’s forgiveness doesn't necessarily mean being soft or easily molded, even if Arad is quick to add that the chair is indeed comfortable.

Tinker chair. Image credit: Ron Arad Studio.

Arad himself never wanted to be an artisan, and questions why furniture has to be “perfect”, why it can’t resemble something like a sketch. Although, later on, Arad would develop this philosophy to flip this question on its head entirely, asking why couldn’t a piece of furniture be as precise as jewellery. Rather than presenting this as a contradiction, however, Arad offers it as a natural progression of his work, maturing his argument to follow the work wherever it may lead.

That willingness to follow the work wherever it leads extends, it turns out, to a makeshift car built from studio cushions. Arad had designed a piece titled Morgan under cover, a woven fabric cover for a Morgan car, intended for the Royal Academy Summer Show in 2020, his sketch translated into jacquard weave by a factory in Belgium. Whilst the show was cancelled due to the pandemic, Arad wanted to see how the fabric might look, so he built a rough approximation of the car from whatever was lying around his house. “It took me ten minutes to build the car,” he says, compellingly describing his Morgan car cover as a piece “that existed and then didn’t exist”. He also speaks of the freedom he felt making the studio version of the piece, in that it was something nobody was going to see. The problem was that when he looked at it, he liked it just as much as the fabric. “It's not that one was better than the other.” Whether arriving fully formed, or from whatever might be lying around, Arad doesn’t seem to mind which way his work comes, instead choosing to treat particular circumstances as yet another tool to work with.

Morgan Under Cover. Image Credit: Ron Arad Studio.

This idea, that the context and circumstances behind a work become part of the work whether you intend it to or not, runs through to the series Arad named Don't F** With A Mouse. Approached by Disney to mark Mickey Mouse's 90th birthday, the licensing company involved went bankrupt before the project could be realised. Arad kept the work and made it a studio edition of 20, but faced a naming problem. He knew he couldn't call it Mickey Mouse, so he went to his IP lawyer with a proposal, could he call it Topolino, the Italian translation? “Strictly speaking, you can,” the lawyer told him, before adding that in his profession, there was a well-worn saying: “don't f*** with the mouse”. Arad didn't hesitate, "That's a better name," he said.

The last object Arad brings his attention to, relating to these ideas, is a chair whose backrest curves to shape the ears of Mickey Mouse, made the day Britain left the European Union. He had bought every newspaper published that morning and embedded them into this very piece, titling it What Now? Some of these newspapers expressed mourning, and some celebrated, all were ultimately sealed onto this object. “It froze the day, so the culture of where it was made, the place at the time, was captured there”, Arad says. In his hands, even everyday objects like chairs have the power to freeze time.

What Now. Image credit: Ron Arad Studio.

 Arad's desire to play with words and what they contain didn't stop at newspaper headlines. In cutting the word "love" from a flat surface, he discovered that its shadow spells "song", a find he describes with delight as if he has unlocked something the material had been hiding all along, waiting for him to carve. Out of this project, came sculptures, a “love song” in Africa made from oil drums, and then a three-metre version carved from a single piece of marble. The piece was then bought by collectors in Toronto and arrived in winter snow. Speaking of this series, Arad notes that “Text is the raw material,” “as important as steel is and as marble.” The title of a subsequent piece in the same vein, Not Carved in Stone, is, he confirms with some satisfaction, carved in stone.

Love Song. Image Credit: Ron Arad Studio.

Arad’s ease with contradiction traces back to where he began, he trained at the Architectural Association in London, choosing it over art school because at the time with nothing being built in England the Architectural Association felt more like an art school anyway. All architecture was conceptual and constraints, Arad says, are simply something you deal with, often creatively. He applies this logic at every scale. Even a security desk in a building foyer begins, he says, with an “irresponsible sketch”. The same goes for a book commissioned by the Einstein Foundation to mark 150 years of the theory of relativity. This book is made up of 100 pages, each written by a world visionary, and 3D printed as a single unbound piece in the shape of Einstein’s face. One copy was printed on a space station, which required printing upside down to account for gravity. Arad recounts this with the same even tone he uses to describe hammering steel. These new constraints are simply new problems to solve for Arad, usually approaching things in ways they have never been done before.

The most recent object Arad shows is a sofa, possessing no back, no seat, and no arms, the object appears to float. Everyone who encounters it in the studio, he says, ends up crawling on the floor trying to work out how it holds itself up. He seems pleased by the fact that these people often don’t succeed in discovering the secret. When the conversation turns to Arad’s own work becoming vintage, particularly early pieces he had made which then (and perhaps still do) feel rebellious, now hanging in galleries as collectible artefacts, he pauses. "It was contemporary work when I did it," he says. He is more interested, he admits, in his new work, the old pieces taking care of themselves.

Amidst his new work is his submission to the 2026 Summer exhibition, a series of eye tests made up of quotes by Picasso, Warhol, Oscar Wilde, and Shaw. Some of these are formatted as prints, with letters, fonts, and colours being Arad’s tools in the same way steel once was. Slipped among these eye tests is a quote of his own, that “Boredom is the mother of creativity, jealousy is the stepfather”. He mentions this somewhat in passing, but for a man who has spent four decades finding songs inside words and sculptures inside materials, it may be the most revealing thing he has expressed to date. That breadth is on full display at Opera Gallery Monaco, where an exhibition running from 27 April to 28 May 2026 draws together more than 30 years of his work, from early pieces like This Mortal Coil (1992) to recent additions like The Good Ping Pong Dining Table (2023), tracing the through-line of a practice that has always treated every constraint and every material as just another tool to create art.