Rana Begum Sees What You Don’t
“Art became a tool to communicate, at first,” she told Hyperallergic. "Then it became an obsession.”
The London-based artist Rana Begum’s show at Lehmann Maupin — her first solo show in New York — is a perceptual mindfuck, in the best possible way. Across 18 works drawn from different series that thread through the artist’s career, we see her using simple, industrial materials — glass, automotive parts, chain link, metal — to create complex, phenomenological, and even paradoxical experiences of color and light.
“There are three core elements in my work: light, form, and color,” Begum told me during a walk-through of her show a few days before it opened. “Those three things coexist in each work. There’s a different kind of balance for each series. One will be more about light and the next will be more about form, and so on. But either way, the three coexist in the work, and you can’t take any one away.”
One of the first works in the show, “No. 1628” (2026), is composed of a series of powder-coated aluminum bars mounted to the wall; the sides of each bar are painted a vivid, almost neon, yellow and pink, respectively. But the precise distance of the bars from one another creates strange optical effects as you walk around the piece, so that other phantom hues and even geometric patterns emerge — it’s like a lenticular photograph, but one that depends only on color and light, not imagery.
“I think all my work has a sense of time as well,” Begum added. “You have to observe, see how the work shifts and changes through the day.” This quality was perceptible even over the course of my hour-long visit to the gallery — the piece, installed near a window, seemed preternaturally responsive to small changes in the position of the sun.
“This series, which I started around 2007, is an anchor for me,” she added. “Just mentally, it’s crazy that this is happening in your eye and brain, right?”
