A celebrated innovator in postmodern design, Ron Arad is often credited with ensconcing the field firmly within the twenty-first century. Arad attended the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem during the early 1970s, soon moving to London, where he established his studio One Off, with collaborator Caroline Thorman in 1981. Even at the inception of his career, Arad employed cutting-edge technologies and novel materials to experiment in furniture-making. The result was a playful resurrection of Expressionism, with unexpected lines and volumes rendered in such materials as polyurethane, carbon, and patinated and sprung steel. The Blown Out of Proportion (B.O.O.P.) vase fully embodies this innovative spirit. Produced in 1998 in conjunction with the Blown Out of Proportion (B.O.O.P.) collection, Arad utilized superplastic aluminum, a novel medium at the time, which allowed for extreme contortions and hollowing, due to its fine-grained nature. To create the vase, Arad heated the aluminum and inflated it through a stencil, forming the ballooning hollows that are characteristic of the series. The present vase was the first and largest work that Ron Arad produced for the B.O.O.P. series, and it was exhibited at the critically acclaimed exhibition, Ron Arad: No Discipline, at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009.