MOSCOW.
This spring, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first solo exhibition in Russia of Rasheed Araeen (b. 1935, Karachi, Pakistan), presenting six decades of work by the seminal practitioner who has had a profound influence on generations of artists, writers, and thinkers around the world.
Known for his strident critique of the ideological and political assumptions of Western modernism, Araeen trained as an engineer in Karachi, before moving to London in 1964 in pursuit of an artistic career. There, he first became known as a pioneering sculptor and installation artist in the (then) emerging field of minimalism, receiving the prestigious John Moores Prize for sculpture in 1969.
The last five years have seen a world-wide reappraisal of Araeen’s work, including large-scale projects at Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens, and the Venice Biennial (both 2017), as well as the Sharjah Art Foundation (2014) and Tate Modern (2013) and spaces in Sao Paolo (2016), Dubai and Hong Kong (2015), Karachi (2014), and Peru (2013).
A Retrospective is the first comprehensive survey of Areen’s work, revealing the scope of the artist’s expanded artistic practice, from his early experiments in painting in Karachi and groundbreaking minimalist sculptures in London, to key political pieces from the 1970s and 1980s—including his pioneering writing, editorial, and curatorial projects—as well as a selection of his new geometric paintings and wall structures.
Especially for Garage, Araeen will develop an Atrium Commission, producing a sculpture he first envisaged in 1968. In a gesture that puts the artist in dialogue with the glorious and troubled history of the Russian avant-garde, Homage to Tatlin directly references Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the 3rd International, suggesting a kinship of non-Western modernities. 
Photos: Rasheed Araeen.
