Ron Gilad, Keitelman Gallery

Ron Gilad presents “House Sweet House”

Keitelman Gallery Brussels / September, 13 > October, 31

The Keitelman Gallery is delighted to present the work of the Israeli artist Ron Gilad for the first time in Belgium. Ron Gilad’s work is in several major collections around the world, including MOMA, the Museum of Art & Design, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

Ron Gilad divides his time between Tel Aviv, where he was born in 1972, and Milan. His highly original work makes reference to Belgian surrealism, whilst being also solidly rooted in the world of design (he won the 2013 Wallpaper* Design Award). He has developed a style of sculpture which plays, with elegance and humour, with the codes of minimalism, in the art historic sense of the term, (in other words referring to the 1960s movement which privileged form and medium and the spectator’s immediate response) rather than in the more generalised sense in which it is used today to describe a somewhat transhistoric aesthetic that governs urbanism, architecture, design and the environment. This aesthetic is increasingly present in today’s landscape not least because it is indirectly promoted by the use of design software that is increasingly imposed in offices.

Against this panorama of minimalist art and its ‘non-artistic’ development, Ron Gilad has created a body of work which wittily contests the assumptions of both camps – the fine art camp and the ‘non art’ camp, echoing Marcel Duchamp’s practice of assigning an artistic value to a bottle rack or bicycle wheels.

Ron Gilad’s sculptures have a simple, graphic elegance and are made of expensive and durable materials that have traditionally been used in ‘great’ sculpture – marble, metal and glass. But where his Greek and Roman artistic forebears made sculptures of mythical or allegorical figures, and where his minimalist forebears of the 1960s were thinking in terms of phenomenology, Ron Gilad literally takes these figures and themes down from their pedestals and makes them whirl around the exhibition space, encouraging interaction and engaging the viewer in a game of cat and mouse.

Carl André’s squares appear to have escaped and are now scattered around the exhibition space. The horizon of a city surreptitiously becomes a drawing tool, projecting a shadow willy-nilly onto a sunny day. A cloud of smoke crowning a house emerges from its figurative role in a Magritte painting, where it asks nothing of anybody, to leap to the ground and form a sculpture of prophetic stone. The plan of your new house, as yet unbuilt, comes to life in the exhibition space in the mimetic lines, more realistic than nature itself, of a sculpture by Sol Lewitt. Beyond his witty, fresh and lively approach, another remarkable characteristic of Ron Gilad’s work is the ability to create a universe that is out of time – a sort of domain of the gods, a world of platonic ideas in which death (a theme common to much Israeli art in general) doesn’t seem common, unlike imagination.

Opening (6-9pm) Thursday 13.09.2014
Tuesday – Saturday 12 to 6pm
44 rue Van Eyck – 1000 Brussels

Ron Gilad was one of our special guests in TLmag 19.

Lise Coirier wrote an article about his art of being a messenger :

Do not take him too seriously. Ron Gilad is disrupting our perception of objects to push us beyond our vision of what may be materialised or dematerialised. In the real world, we have to allow ourselves to imagine and seek happiness. Ron is offering us a journey into his so-called trilogy of The Logical, the Ironic and the Absurd. An invitation to explore his mental landscape.

As an individual with a unique profile, Ron is looking for meaning and playfulness, applying his thoughts and creativity to art, interacting from time to time with design. He is in love with objects that he likes to reproduce as drawings in linear form, as a defined frontier between the territories of the real and the unreal. Curated by Meira Yagid-Haimovici at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Department of Design and Architecture, the monographic show of Ron Gilad reveals the rich facets of his work, through 100 pieces which range from pure fine arts to the world of tangible objects with a use. Functionality doesn’t drive his work but he plays on it… Famous Italian brands such as Flos, Molteni and the design gallery Dilmos have all understood his approach. They are addicted to his style of work which always focuses on the sculptural dimension of a light or a piece of furniture, without compromising on beauty ­- the key to good living.

Out of the frame, beyond frontiers

But Ron Gilad does not want to be categorised as a designer, preferring the term free-speaking artist… He is also going to challenge himself by building his first and probably unique house for one of his best friends, the owner of Flos, Piero Gandini. This ‘sculptural’ piece of architecture will take advantage of the beautiful shores of Lake Garda. But it’s not going to be a public project, just private. From New York to Tel Aviv, he has been going back to his roots but he also loves staying in Italy where I met him. He had just received the Elle Decor International Designer of the Year Award for furniture design at the Salone del Mobile in April, earlier in the year. At that time he was feeling quite disturbed about the idea of being a designer…

An intimate storyboard

Inspired and intellectual, Ron Gilad reinvents new realms for things which already serve a functional purpose in our daily lives. He gives them a new twist by re-creating a new function for the concept of a ‘home’. As curator Meira Yagid-Haimovici states: “Gilad’s work ranges from multiple scale two-dimensional line drawings to three-dimensional sculptures. Material aspects are another central concern in Gilad’s works, which investigates how matter vanishes and things cease to exist.” Poetry is inherent to his objects, which are made first and foremost in an attempt to explore the state of mind of modern æsthetics, which surely needs to be called into question for the sake of our souls as human beings.