Rana Begum has established an internationally respected practice creating immaculately conceived and constructed abstract installations that challenge the distinction between two and three-dimensional practice, sculpture and painting.
Lodged between optical art and minimalism, Rana’s works draw their inspiration from repetitive geometric patterns found within Islamic art and urban architecture. Rana’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 itself. Born in Bangladesh in 1977, Rana Begum now lives and works in London. In 1999, she graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design and, in 2002, gained an MFA in Painting from Slade School of Fine Art. In 2016, Begum was commissioned to make a major new outdoor work, No. 700 Reflectors, for Lewis Cubitt Square at King’s Cross and was awarded the prestigious Abraaj prize, Art Dubai 2017.