MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Rasheed Araeen is considered one of the pioneers of conceptual and minimalist art in Great Britain. He began making conceptual and abstract art in Karachi, Pakistan, in the late 1950s, before moving to London in 1964 where he made some of the earliest minimalist sculptures to be seen in Britain. Nine is a key example of Araeen’s sculptural work from the 1960s using geometric principles. Formed of a 3x3 unit structure, it makes use of the concept of 'broken symmetry' central to Araeen's understanding of art. Simultaneously creating and disrupting symmetry in order to avoid perfect symmetry, Nine thus forms a tension between universality and difference.