Rana Begum uses light, space, and color to create transformative artworks that are completed by the viewer’s experience of them. This exhibition, Begum’s first museum survey in the U.S., unites numerous series of works made over the course of her career. Arranged in seven distinct groupings, this selection demonstrates the breadth of her practice, highlighting how she expands on legacies of abstraction, Minimalism, and Op art through a contemporary global lens. Begum’s work harnesses geometry and light effects to dynamic ends, embracing modern industrial materials such as automobile light reflectors, safety tape, metal or glass panels, and even chain link fence segments. By recontextualizing these elements in imaginative ways, the artist produces formally compelling installations that dazzle the eye.

Many of Begum’s works shift almost imperceptibly as viewers circulate them, with their pristinely painted surfaces effusing a luminosity that seems to radiate and encompass the museum’s walls in their glow. Our embodied experiences of these poetic artworks highlight the complexities of human perception and the nuanced way we each view the world around us. The intricate spatial and visual act of engaging with Begum’s work initiates transformation, evolving from the aesthetic realm to that of wonder and delight — an encounter with art that allows us to reach toward the profound.