Rasheed Araeen's exhibition at the BALTIC centre for contemporary arts, was a thorough representation of the development of his work throughout his lifetime as an artist - from his early paintings to his political endeavours and more recent experiments with geometric shape and vivid colour. The work, spanning over 60 years, was displayed on two floors of the gallery, with a mix of sculpture, paintings, drawings, film and digital pieces. Also included, were a collection of materials relating to Araeen's work and writing.
Moving to Britain from Pakistan in the 60s, Araeen created a lot of minimalist sculpture and became a pioneer of the art world. Since then, he has experimented with a range of styles and methods to portray a variety of meanings. 'In the beginning' is a series of drawings and painings depicting people and places from Pakistan in the 50s. In this stage Araeen developed an interest in fluidity such as that in fire or water. He created a few abstract pieces that demonstrate these aspects. Moving on from this, Araeen developed his sculptural work. Symmetrical structures painted in bright colours scatter the exhibition - a homage to his past as an engineer. Metal and wood are popular in this section with sculptures of all sizes and compositions, but all, most importantly, symmetrical.
Rasheed Araeen's work took a turn in the 1970s with a strongly politically driven motive. Tying to tackle the issues arising with discrimination in not only the art scene, but Britain itself, he moved onto collage, photography, installation, performance, writing and editing. This section of the exhibition held some of my favourite work - a series of pieces made up of repetitive images depicting the reality of Britain in the 70s. Each piece is thought provoking and hard hitting, but still fit into the exhibition and held the same symmetrical, geometrical values of his previous work. This work lead into more political work based on his home country, with graphic imagery, geometric shapes and the colour green - a predominant colour in Islamic culture.
Finally, the exhibition presented Rasheed Araeens most recent work - colourful lattice structures and boxes named after famous mathematicians and intellectuals. I liked these pieces because as you walked around the exhibition, the perspective of these structures changed, as did the colours. It made the work more interactive and interesting to look at.