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Rasheed Araeen has produced a body of work over six decades that is both visually arresting and politically engaged. He talks to Apollo about minimalism, modernism and the optimism at the heart of all his work
It almost seems as if Rasheed Araeen is preparing to move out of his studio, a suite of whitewashed rooms above a discount furniture store in Cricklewood, northwest London. Geometric paintings are stacked against walls, canvases from his recent Opus series that are shrouded in plastic, through which can be seen a checkerboard pattern painted in diamonds of vibrant colour (Fig. 1). An enlarged photograph of a blonde woman, from a Pakistani advertisement for cosmetics, stares out behind them with a mediumistic intensity. More than 60 years of Araeen's work is being crated up and transported to the Van Abbemuseum in Rotterdam, which is staging a major career retrospective of the artist (until 25 March; the exhibition will tour to MAMCO in Geneva, the BALTIC in Gateshead, and Garage Museum in Moscow). The octogenarian artist, who sports an impressive moustache, sits at a coffee table covered in books, proudly presiding over the shipment.
He offers me tea and a plate of pakora, made by the wife of one of his assistants, who is busy covering a sculp-ture made ofgridded, interlocking wooden struts with red paint. It is one of 28 that are destined for the atrium of a new building being constructed by the Aga Khan Foundation behind King's Cross, where they will rise in two rows to a height of 30 metres. Araeen studied civil engineering at the University of Karachi, before emigrating to London in 1964, with dreams of becoming an artist. He immediately fell under the spell of Anthony Caro, who had also trained as an engineer and then dominated the city's art scene. Araeen's resulting 'structures', designs depicting symmetrical stacks and rows of steel I-beams (SculptureNo.1 and SculptureNo.2, both 1965), cubes and lattice towers, have earned him recognition as a pioneer of British minimalism.
In the early 1970s, having won prizes but - because of his ethnicity - nevertheless struggling to find gallery representation, Araeen had what he describes as 'a political awakening'. He joined the Black Panther Movement, of which South Asians formed...