Rasheed Araeen

Aicon is proud to present In Lights by Rasheed Araeen, a solo exhibition of the artist’s recent paintings and wall structures, centered around two brand-new neon works. With a career spanning over six decades, including six solo exhibitions at Aicon’s New York gallery, Araeen’s In Lights brings together his iconic geometric wall structures with new and innovative works, showing that this minimalist master has no sign of slowing down. During the course of the show, Aicon will host a book launch and reception celebrating Araeen’s 2024 publication, Art and Institutional Racism. In this collection of essays, Araeen confronts the British art galleries and institutions who excluded his work and made it “extremely difficult to communicate meaningfully and exchange ideas.”

The recent re-hang of MoMA’s galleries has seen Araeen’s work included in step with artists like Donald Judd and Eva Hesse, challenging the roots of ethnic barriers, neo-colonialism, and imperialist attitudes for which Araeen’s work and texts are known. His work can also be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and Yale Center for British Art. 

Araeen’s foray into neon over the past few years highlights the artist’s ever-evolving interest in material and the ways in which an artwork can transform its environment. Known for his interactive structures that require viewer participation to rearrange the works, thereby altering how a work relates to a specific space, the neon work’s transfiguration of space is self-contained. From the second they are turned on, the intensely colored light emitted by the works reshapes the room. Although concerned with form, these neon works critically engage with space and subvert the circumscribed standard of viewing art in a white cube. This visual critique of the homogenized contemporary exhibition space is a continuation of the artist’s career-long dismantling of systemic exclusionary art institutional practices.

The paintings in In Lights act as two-dimensional images of the neon structures. Using ultramarine blue and black for the background makes the geometric calligraphy painted in vivid colors pop in a way that emulates the glowing neon. In these paintings, the artist simplifies the word “Allah” to its most basic geometric form, creating a minimal, abstract composition. The works challenge Western-centric perceptions by reclaiming geometric and calligraphic abstraction as inherently global practices with deep historical roots beyond the European tradition. Araeen articulates a critical stance that situates abstraction as both culturally specific and universally accessible, drawing attention to the two-way permeable boundaries between artistic traditions across cultures.

Rounding out the exhibition is a selection of texts, written by and about the artist, scattered throughout the gallery on the artist’s signature blocks. Araeen turned to writing in the 1970s as a way to address the lack of representation of non-white artists in the British art world. His journals, Black Phoenix (1973) and Third Text (1978), quickly became essential reading for anyone looking and living outside the Western canon, acting as critical spaces for engaging with issues of race, post-colonial identity, and the geopolitics of art. The artist’s most recent publication, Art and Institutional Racism (2024), “not only confronts the Eurocentricity of art history but also redefines modernism and its art history. And in doing so it aims to liberate art from Eurocentrism and also society as a whole from its lingering imperialism.”
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Rasheed Araeen was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1935. He has lived and worked in London, England since 1964. In 2010, Aicon Gallery, London, hosted the first major retrospective of Araeen’s work in over a decade, paving the way for a new string of exhibitions and critical attention. A long overdue major retrospective toured Europe between 2017 and 2019, starting at the Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands, traveling to the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Switzerland, and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, United Kingdom, before concluding at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia. He has participated in several important group exhibitions, including the 57th Venice Biennale and documenta 14 – Universe in Universe, staged in Kassel and Athens. Araeen’s Zero to Infinity took over the Tate’s famed Turbine Hall for the summer of 2023. A new iteration of Zero to Infinity, along with Sculpture No 2 (1965/2015), will be on display in the forthcoming exhibition, Minimal, at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris from October 8, 2025 through January 18, 2026. 

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