Tel Aviv-based designer Maor Aharon was born in Rishon LeZion, Israel in 1984. He studied Design at the Holon Institute of Technology (H.I.T.), graduating with distinction in 2015. That same year he founded his own studio in nearby Jaffa, located south along the coast from Tel Aviv, where he has been based ever since. The young designer did not have to wait long for his first dose of success; in 2016 his work was featured in the show Design After Design at the 21st Triennale of Milan; at Jerusalem Design Week; the London Design Fair; and Taiwan Designers’ Week. Off the back of these exhibitions, he was labeled the Most Promising Designer 2016 by BVD, a leading design and architecture publication in Israel.
Aharon’s aesthetic is heavily weighted towards process: each project begins with research and experimentation into materials and technology in an effort to push the tools with which he works to their very limits. In this sense, he is a maker who is driven as much by curiosity as by concept. Aharon’s exploration of the boundaries between craft and industry, functional and decorative, or hi-tech and lo-fi is captured in projects and series that are notable for their unusual materials, clean forms, and delicately playful color palettes. In each case, the means of production —the process— is beautifully preserved in the final form of the piece. Take the Matter of Motion (2016), for example: probably Aharon’s best-known work to date, this engaging collection of simple stools balances a certain coherence of form with hand-crafted uniqueness and upcycling with innovative new technological approaches. Each piece in the collection is based on stool legs sourced from furniture abandoned on the streets of Tel Aviv and melds these existing forms with a uniformly shaped seat and intricately layered resin colored with natural pigments. To create the series, Aharon first invented a custom machine to spin the piece as it was being molded; using centrifugal forces to shape the different layers of colored resin while they were in motion.
