SPEAKER SERIES | Art Education, For Life: Omer Arbel

Join us for a Speaker Series talk with Omer Arbel, the co-founder and creative director of Bocci and founder of Omer Arbel Office.
About this Event

Join us at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art for an evening presentation of our Speaker Series - Art Education, For Life: Reflections by Omer Arbel. Learn about the ways in which art education has impacted his life and journey as an artist, industrial designer, and business owner.

Date: Thursday, November 26, 2026

Doors and Reception: 6:00 pm

Talk Begins: 6:30 PM

Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art

Main Floor

2121 Lonsdale Avenue, North Vancouver, B.C

Co-founder and Creative Director of Bocci and founder of Omer Arbel Office (OAO), Omer Arbel’s wide-ranging career offers a reflection on the lasting influence of creative education on his practice, which moves fluidly between architecture, sculpture, industrial design and materials research.

Trained in architecture, Arbel's approach is grounded in critical inquiry, spatial awareness, and experimentation. His work reflects the broader premise of Art Education, for Life: that early engagement with art and creative education are not simply preparation for a particular profession, but a way of approaching ideas, materials and problems over a lifetime. Through sustained experimentation with glass, concrete, metals, and light, Arbel demonstrates how curiosity and craft can form the foundation of an evolving creative practice.

This conversation offers audiences a rare opportunity to hear directly from Arbel about the experiences that have shaped that practice. Reaching back into childhood, he will reflect on formative encounters with art and making, and consider how they may have informed the interests, instincts and obsessions that continue to surface in his work today. For artists, designers, students and anyone curious about the creative process, the talk offers an inside look at what it means to build a life around inquiry, making and experimentation.

Omer Arbel is the co-founder and creative director of Bocci, and the founder of Omer Arbel Office (OAO). His work spans buildings, lighting, objects, and installations, rooted in a sustained investigation into materials and light as a medium.

Arbel trained under Enric Miralles in Barcelona and Patkau Architects in Vancouver before establishing OAO in 2003. His practice is organised around a sequential numbering system in which each project, regardless of scale or discipline, is assigned a number in order of its creation, a structure that reflects his resistance to separating architecture, design, and art into distinct categories.

His built work includes House 75.9, a concrete house on a hay farm in the Canadian Pacific Northwest where columns formed using fabric formwork emerge from the landscape like archaeological ruins, winner of the World Architecture Festival Award in 2019. Bridge House 91 is suspended between two rocky ridges over a fern gully on a waterfront lot in British Columbia's Gulf Islands, clad in heavily sandblasted cedar and designed to anticipate rising sea levels over the next century. Governors Point is a 16-home community on a protected coastal peninsula in Washington State's Salish Sea, where the architecture and the surrounding 98-acre nature reserve are conceived together.

Large-scale installations from Bocci have been on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Barbican, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Arbel's sculptural work has been exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver, Carwan Gallery in Athens, and Aedes Architekturforum in Berlin.