Image courtesy of Aicon Gallery

Pakistani engineer turned conceptual artist, Rasheed Araeen, is using his geometric art to highlight racism and inequality. LUX explores the history behind his celebrated works
A man wearing a beige jacket and striped shirt standing in front of a geometric painting

Rasheed Araeen

Rasheed Araeen is now considered one of Britain’s pioneers of minimalist sculpture during the mid to late 20th Century. But during that period, he received little institutional recognition for his contribution to the modernist discourse in Britain. Araeen’s Pakistani background side-lined him as a non-European whose work was consistently evaluated within the context of post-colonial structures, which inevitably resulted in far less exposure.

A yellow, blue, red and black wooden clock with cut out shapes hanging on a wall and open sided cubes in blue, yellow, greed and red on the wooden floor

Black Square Breaking into Primary Colours, 2016, from the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation

This latent racism led to his work in the 1970s and 1980s – in performance, photography, painting and sculpture – developing an overtly political content which drew attention to the way in which black artists were invisible within the dominant Eurocentric culture.

pieces of paper with colourful drawings stuck on a wall

Untitled, 2015

Araeen is now famously known for using geometric structures, in which vertical and horizontal lines are held together by a network of diagonals, to play on the links between Eastern and Western thought and the frameworks of social institutions and aesthetics.

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He often overlays his photographs within geometric structures, to further emphasise humans and the social structure in which they exist.

Rhapsody in Four Colours, 2018. Image courtesy of Aicon Gallery

Araeen comments, “I’m sick of the avant-garde and I want to get out of it. It is believed that the idea of abstraction is a twentieth-century phenomenon. In Damascus, it took place 1200 years ago. Nobody wants to hear about that in Europe.”

Read more: Behind The Lens Of Sunil Gupta’s Photographs

purple, green and orange triangles on a black and white diamond background

OPUS TD 3 (2), 2017. Image courtesy of Aicon Gallery

Through his artworks and books, Araeen has become a key activist in establishing a black voice in Britain’s art scene, publishing ‘Black Phoenix’ in 1978, and subsequently ‘Third Text’ in 1987, and ‘Third Text Asia’ in 2008. Araeen also founded Kala Press, to spread information and recognition of unacknowledged African and Asian artists in Britain who contributed to the development of post-war British art.

Rasheed Araeen lives and works in London. He is represented by Grosvenor Gallery.

This article was published in association with the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation