Rana Begum at Lehmann Maupin

Photo: Disclosure
A chain-link fence transformed into a suspended, three-dimensional form opens Rana Begum's first solo exhibition in New York, at Lehmann Maupin, shortly after her debut in American museums at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah. For two decades, she has been building a language of phenomenological abstraction centered on light. The Bengali-British artist uses industrial materials and geometric motifs from Islamic art and architecture as a starting point — in dialogue with artists like Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt. At the center of the exhibition is a large-scale installation from the "Chainlink" series, which softens the industrial character of the chain-link fabric by revealing the beauty of its woven texture; the piece "No.1272", from the same series, stems from a reflection on Mark Rothko's overlapping color fields. The "Louvre" series, the result of a decade of research with metal, stone, and glass, investigates permeability through architectural elements such as louvers and brise-soleils, alternating between ethereal appearance and solidity as the light changes. The reliefs in the "Fold" series, inspired by the centuries-old tradition of kite-making in Bangladesh, fold sheets of metal into geometric shapes that cast shadows and color gradations beyond the object itself, expanding the composition onto the surrounding walls.