Before the Departure (Black Paintings)

Rasheed Araeen repurposed his formative experience as a civil engineer in Karachi into a personal language entirely his own. He used the central motif of minimalism, namely, the positioning of a grid, to form a space of activist potential, implicating equilateral forms of space alongside the suggestive power of the diagonal as a conceptual strike mark into action. These formulations are evident in Before the Departure (Black Paintings) (1963–1964), grid-like forms assembled into dense architectural vistas as if the intelligibility of a space might be found only by continually drawing over it.

^{*Currently exhibited at Aranya Art Center}