Aric Attas, courtesy the Gallery at Windsor
Growing up in Bangladesh and Hertfordshire, England, Rana Begum didn’t know that being an artist was a possible future for her. Her father worked various jobs to support the family, and brought them to the UK looking for a better life. “I didn’t even know I could draw,” the artist told me recently, but since she didn’t yet speak English when she arrived in the UK in 1983, her teachers gave her colored pencils to keep her busy, and it stuck. “Art became a tool to connect with other people,” she added.
Her teachers encouraged Begum’s parents to let her take a year’s worth of introductory art courses, and support from a visiting uncle pushed them over the edge to allow it. When she was invited to an interview at London’s Chelsea College of Arts, her father surprised her by hiring a man with a van to bring her work to the school, where the crit session continued from the gallery out into the street. (Much of this is described in the charming 2023 children’s book The Girl Who Played with Colour: The Story of the Artist Rana Begum.) She earned a BA there in 1999 before going on to earn an MFA in painting at London’s Slade School of Fine Art in 2002.
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The connections instigated by Begum’s art have taken her around the world, with shows at Shanghai’s Long Museum in 2015 and London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2023, and inclusion in the 2016 Gwangju Biennale, among others. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2020. But for her parents, a crowning achievement, she said, came in 2014, when her work was exhibited in Bangladesh as part of the 2014 Dhaka Art Summit.
Begum’s work, which often enlists industrial materials into elegant abstractions that combine strains of American Minimalism and the Islamic architecture and design that surrounded her growing up, is now on view in “Reflection,” at the Gallery at Windsor, in Vero Beach, Florida. The show, on view through May 8, traveled to the private commercial enterprise from the SCAD Museum of Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, where it formed her US institutional debut. The museum’s chief curator, Daniel S. Palmer, had followed her work closely since first seeing it about a decade ago at her Dubai gallery, Third Line.
Aric Attas, courtesy the Gallery at Windsor
Founded in 2002, the Gallery at Windsor has hosted exhibitions of globally known artists including Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Peter Doig, Jasper Johns, Grayson Perry, and Ed Ruscha. It is set in Windsor, a 472-acre oceanfront sporting club community a few hours’ drive north of Miami, founded by Canadian billionaires Galen and Hilary M. Weston. The gallery is open to the public by appointment; requested donations for admission to Begum’s show will go to the Alzheimer and Parkinson Association of Indian River County.
Windsor cofounder and creative director Hilary M. Weston (also a onetime lieutenant-governor of Ontario) had already been interested in showing Begum’s work, so it made sense for the works to make the short trip from the SCAD Museum. (She passed away in 2025 at age 83.) It’s a fitting place for the show to travel, Palmer noted, since Windsor is planned on the concepts of New Urbanism, an influential 1980s design movement that was partly inspired by cities like Savannah.
Aric Attas, courtesy the Gallery at Windsor
“It really bowled me over,” Palmer told me recently as we stood in front of the piece No. 827 (2018), when he saw it at Third Line. At first he thought he was looking at a painted wall, but when the colors began to change as he walked by, he laughed out loud with delight. The piece actually consists of 30 metal bars, over six feet high and two inches deep, that hang in a tight row on the wall. They’re painted white on top, and many of them are partially painted in various colors—pale pink, lavender, powder blue—on their sides, so that reflected light creates a subtle symphony of changing colors as viewers walk back and forth in front of the piece. It’s a commonplace to say that the viewer completes the artwork, but here’s a piece where what happens in the viewer’s literal eyes is actually essential.
The piece brings together two fundamental interest of Begum’s, she told me. “I spent years studying color, and I needed the work to embody change—I needed it to be kinetic, but without moving.” The work surprised even her, she said. “I wanted the colors to shift as you move, but I didn’t expect them to mix. Then I saw that the colors were mixing in the eye, and I went wild.”
Begum’s work lives partly in a lineage of American Minimalism, said Palmer, noting similarities to the work of Anni Albers, Dan Flavin, and Agnes Martin, among others. Begum was raised in a Muslim family, so her childhood involved participating in group readings of the Quran. The repetitions that take place in repeated readings of the religious text, as well as in Islamic art and design, also echo through her work.
No. 1272 Chainlink (2023) comprises numerous sheets of fencing that hang from the ceiling, layered one behind another, and they have been powder-coated in shades of red and blue, so that, as the viewer walks around the piece, their deep colors combine in varying proportions. The artist was thinking of Minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt and Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, and wanted to translate their concerns into a material she had been confronted with in the Coachella Valley when she participated in the 2023 Desert X Biennial.
Aric Attas, courtesy the Gallery at Windsor
Begum often takes inspiration from architecture and design, including the ways that light plays off of buildings’ surfaces and the louvers and vents that allow air to circulate, letting buildings breathe, as she describes it. Three large wall-hung sculptural pieces from the “Louvre” series, in yellow, red, and dark gray, hang at Windsor, each with 20 translucent horizontal bars; the lower ones are relatively opaque, and the amount of pigment is gradually reduced so that the top bars in each almost seem to dissolve.
In a great artistic tradition, Begum sources her art materials from places like hardware stores. Some wall pieces use just the same kinds of reflective panels you might find in the spokes of a bicycle, which she came across in a shop in Bangkok while on a British Council Residency; the orange ones she found put her in mind of the robes of Buddhist monks she saw in the street. As one moves around the pieces, the materials’ reflectivity waxes and wanes, sometimes looking as though there are tiny light bulbs glowing inside them. A few columnar sculptures stand outside the building that houses the gallery, their strict geometry and bright hues in marked contrast to the lush surroundings.
Aric Attas, courtesy the gallery at Windsor
From Palmer’s point of view, it would be “fundamentally impossible” for Begum’s work to be alienating, but the artist understands that people might feel they don’t understand abstract work. But, she said, “You feel it, and you take it with you to how you perceive the world.”
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