Chaar Yaar II (Four Friends)
Rasheed Araeen Pakistani
Not on view
Though not formally trained as an artist, Rasheed Araeen had already exhibited in his native Karachi before moving to London in 1964. Influenced by the history of modernist abstraction, including Neoplasticism and Constructivism, Aareen utilized his background in structural engineering to produce sculptures of open cubes bisected with lateral struts. Handmade of steel or wood and painted in bright colors, the works appear playful in contrast to the more austere works of Minimalists such as Sol LeWitt, whose work Araeen would not encounter until 1969. By that time, and in dialogue with the work of Latin American artists such as Lygia Clark, Araeen had already begun to conceive of his structures as interactive objects to be handled by the viewer, reflecting his concern with art’s relation to everyday life. In the decades that followed, Araeen became a pioneering voice for non-Western narratives of art history, founding the journals Black Phoenix (1978) and Third Text (1987) in his fight against institutional racism.
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