Rana Begum
Rana Begum is an urban Romantic. A sensibility that evolved in opposition to industrialisation and urbanisation has come full circle. In 18th century Europe the Romantics sought refuge from a vulgar future in awesome nature, finding in its inhuman majesty authenticity, purity and wild, profound beauty.
In 2008 humanity officially became an urban species with more than 50% of the global population living in cities. Now the urban environment is our most common habitat. In it Begum finds her moments of transcendence in the myriad, hard, surreal, aesthetic wonders that emerge during any journey through a city.
The essence of the urban experience lies in the human need to find meaning and order in amongst the chaos and complexity of the city. If we, like Christopher Isherwood leaning out his window in Berlin in 1930, imagine ourselves to be a camera or an eye, disconnected from thought, and stood at the heart of our city, then for us the city would become a vast, constantly shifting stream of colour and form, a visual puzzle without end or aim, full of random and momentary meetings of signs and symbols. Transient relations emerge, configure, dissolve and reconfigure as the parade of the mobile passes against the backdrop of the static.
Begum's work is crystalline, simple, pure and hard-edged. She takes her experience of the vibrant collage of the urban environment and concentrates it through a process of refinement and filtration. Her work, minimal in its formal language, imposes order and system, as all art must, by abstracting those moments of accidental, aesthetic wonder. We find bands of deep colour that slowly bleed into each other or else, sit hard by each other. Each mini-colour field might be imagined as representing a momentary visual memory, the remembrance of a colour seen in a specific place and at a specific time, reified, becoming a perfect version of its self.
True to the complexity of urban forms, Begum's works are both sculptures and paintings. Though static they are activated by the mobility of the viewer, using relief and perspective to present the moving eye with shifting patterns of colour and form that ripple, brake and reform. Often formed from repetitive, rectilinear units that bring the wall into the visual play, they remember the fragmentary nature of our visual environments and the contingency of the visual relationships that they generate and yet articulate the human desire to draw out meaning from chaos.
In every aspect Begum's work displays a subtle and acute intelligence.
Amongst the many ends that art can aim for, is an end that Begum's work achieves. That is the articulation of experience in a purified and heightened form that, if properly understood, brings us to a heightened awareness of the original subject that carries within it, into all the messy, imperfect contingencies of life, a memory of the hope that is crystallised in the perfection of art.
Rana Begum
Text by Nick Hackworth
Born in 1977, Sylhet, Bangladesh. Lives and works in London.
Education
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2002 1999 1996
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Slade School of Fine Art London, MFA in Painting Chelsea College of Art and Design, London BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree (Painting) University of Hertfordshire, Hatfielf, Hertfordshire BTEC Diploa in Foundation Studies in Art and Design |
Forthcoming Exhibitions
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2013
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Solo Show, The Third Line, Dubai Solo Show, Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne |
Solo Exhibitions
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2012 2011 2010
2009
2008 2007 |
Solo Show, BISCHOFF/WEISS, London Solo Show, Amrita Jhaveri, Mumbai, India Digital Art Residency at The City Gallery and Phoenix Square, Leicester Fractured Symmetry, BISCHOFF/WEISS, London Solo Show at Delfina Foundation, London Solo Show at Barts Hospital, VitalArts, London The Moment of Alignment solo show at The Third Line, Dubai Transient Symmetry at VineSpace, London Colour Codes at The Third Line, Dubai |
Group Exhibitions
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2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006 2005
2004
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ABC Art Fair, Berlin, with The Third Line Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London Group Show, Galerie Christain Lethert, Cologne The Armory Show, New York, with BISCHOFF/WEISS Art Dubai, with BISCHOFF/WEISS Frieze Art Fair, London, with The Third Line The Art and the Math of the Fold, FT-Contemporary, Berlin Art Dubai, with BISCHOFF/WEISS The New Middle East, Willem Baara, Amsterdam Common Logic, group show at IMT, London Small is Beautiful, Flowers Gallery, London Form & Phenomenon, group show, Project88, India Artissima, Torino, with The Third Line Fiac Art Fair, Paris, with BISCHOFF/WEISS Frieze Art Fair, London, with The Third Line Serendipity City, Future Everything, Manchester Group Show, Red Bull Music Academy, London How Nations are Made, Cartwright Hall and Manor House, Bradford Pattern Recognition, The City Gallery, Leicester Lines of Control, group show, London Identity, group show Aisho Miura Arts, Tokyo Neither Here, Nor There, Various City Locations - Billboards Contact, Bricklane, WOrk No. 951, London Group Show at Pablo's Brithday, New York Repetition and Sequence, Beldam Gallery, Uxbridge Group Show at Pablo's Birthday, New York, NY Sequence and Repetition, Beldam Gallery, Uxbridge Monologue/Dialogue, BU Gallery, Bangkok Art: 21 Power/Memory/Structures/Play, Art Museum of Western Virginia Ad Infinitum: The Aesthetics of Repetition II, Haines Gallery, CA Summer Exhibition, group show, Purdy Hicks, Boston, MA The Same But Different, MILL-WORKERS, Manchester Colour My World, Riflemaker, London Upstarts, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA Summer Exhibition, group show, Prudy Hicjs, Boston, MA Gallery artist, group show, Purdy Hicks, London 2x2 Dahl Gallery, Luzern, Switzerland |
Awards/Commissions/Residencies
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2012 2011
2009 2007 2006 2005
2000 |
Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London Marcol house Commission, London Non Sans Raison commission, France Two months residency in Beirut through Delfina Foundaiton British Council Residency in bangkok Nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award Lewisham Hospital Commission Coventry Hospital Commission in collaboration with Tess Jaray Artist in Residence at West Dean College, West Sussex Arts and Humanities Research Board award for postgraduate study |
Reviews
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2012 2011
2010
2009
2008 2007
2006 2005 2004
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Platform, The Folded Page Wallpaper, Colour Scheme by Deepanjana Pal Vogue India, Shape Shifter by Deepanjana Pal Time Out, India. Block Game by Zeenat Nagree Art Asia Pacific by Hanea Ko Time Out, In the Studio by Helen Sumpter Modern painters, Back to Black by Jyoti Dhar What's On, Dubai, The line of beauty by Catherine Jarvie Gulf News, Dubai newspaper, Lines of enchantment, Jyoti Kalsi Time Out, Dubai, Solid Geometry by Chris Lord The National, Dubai newspaper, Patterns of work by Ed Lake The Financial Times, Abstraction Rules Ok! by Jan Dalley Vogue UK, October Issue, The alchemists by Louisa Buck L'Official Middle East, Colour Codes City Times, Dubai, Colour Codes Gulf News, Dubai, Colour Codes TIme Out, Dubai, Colour Codes Harper's bazaar, Dubai, September Issue, Colour Codes The Nation Newspaper, Bangkok, Monologue/Dialogue Art at the mil, a-n magazine, review of The Same But Different Alison Bing, SF Gate, review of Upstarts, Haines Gallery, San Francisco Apero Newspaper, review 2 x 2 show, Dahl Gallery, Switzerland |
Selected Collections
Coimbatore Centre for Contemporary Arts, Rajshree Pathy Collection, India
MONA (museum of Old and New Art), Tasmania
Art Museum of Western Virginia
Ernst & Young Collection, London
Dahl Gallery, Switzerland
The London Institute