Situated at 1B02, Rossi & Rossi will present a solo Kabinett booth with British-Pakistani artist, Rasheed Araeen.
Born in 1935, Araeen is a London-based artist, activist, writer, editor and curator. In 1964, he moved to the United Kingdom from Pakistan where he had initially trained as a civil engineer. Araeen is recognized as the father of minimalist sculpture in 1960s Britain. His work inperformance, photography, painting, and sculpture throughout the 1970s to 1990s challenged eurocentricsm within the British art establishment and championed the role of minority artists, especially those of Asia, African and Caribbean descent.
In addition to his artistic practice, he took on activist roles with organisations such as the Black Panthers and Artists for Democracy, and founded the critical journals Black Phoenix, Third Text and Third Text Asia. Araeen organised the seminal 1989 exhibition, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists inPost-War Britain, which was held at Southbank Centre, London. Author of numerous essays and journals, including Making Myself Visible (KalaPress, London, 1984), Art Beyond Art: Ecoaesthetics—A Manifesto for the21st Century (Third Text Publications, London, 2010), and most recently, Islam & Modernism (Grosvenor Gallery,London, 2022).
Among the works exhibited at Art Basel Hong Kong 2023is Araeen's Cube as Sculpture (1966/2020). A realisation of a group of sculptures first planned in 1966 - the drawings of which are now held in the Tate collection. The sculpture consists of 12 identically sized cube structures, with the only difference being the addition of increasingly complex diagonal lines that bisects a cube's different faces. Araeen explored the conceptual strategies of symmetry, modularity, and seriality throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, breaking away from traditional responses to the problems of sculptural composition and leading his sculptural practice to be recognized as independant manifestation of strategies associated with American Minimalists such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt.
