In Reverse

In Reverse was a solo exhibition by Ron Arad at the Design Museum Holon in Israel, exploring the relationship between design, manufacturing, and the automobile. At the center of the exhibition was a series of Fiat 500 cars transformed from three-dimensional vehicles into dramatically flattened metal forms and displayed vertically on the museum walls.

Using the Fiat 500 as both an object of industrial design and a material to be manipulated, Arad challenged the conventional process of automotive production. Rather than forming flat sheets of metal into a finished car, the process was reversed: completed vehicles were compressed back into flattened compositions, preserving recognizable traces of their original shape.

CIG contributed to the realization of these works by carrying out the specialist pressing of the Fiat 500 cars in the Netherlands. Using a large industrial press, the vehicles were carefully compressed under Arad’s direction to achieve the flattened forms required for the exhibition.