Two swabs of colour meet at the corners.
An orange, bold and of a sunset hue, is overtaken by a smear of forest green. The two colours don’t mix, making how they interact all the more remarkable. The original vivacity of the orange is subdued underneath the green, with only a dark trace of its outline remaining.
Like the rest of the watercolour works in Rana Begum’s exhibition at The Third Line, the piece shows us that not all colours are equal. The shade of green that overpowers the orange finds its match in another work against a deep, royal purple. In yet another piece, that same purple runs across a luminescent yellow, affecting and being affected by the colour just the same. Elsewhere, trio of pinks are chained together, revealing deeper hues that veer towards orange.
Much like the law of the jungle favours the strong, there is a law of colours that is often only revealed upon application. The nature of the pigment, as well as the material on which it is applied all play a part, as does, of course, the bias of the eye.
Begum tests these interactions across various mediums in Taking Form. The watercolours are the smallest pieces in the exhibition. Yet, they offer a key into how to view the other, more monumental pieces within the show.
“I felt the show needed these works on paper,” Begum tells The National. “I’ve been thinking about the tapestries, about the paintings for a while. But it’s all kind of in my head, and I wanted to express that fluidity and the way I have been thinking about colour.”
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a trio of tapestry pieces, suspended from the high ceiling of the gallery. Much like the watercolours, they express an interplay of colours. The technical aspects of the weaving is stunning. Dark indigo threads run long against pyramids of colour of varying shades of blue and burgundy. The common threads are inconspicuous when viewed from a short distance. Up close, the commonality blooms.
It is a different interplay of colour than the ones on the watercolours, alluding less to jungle laws than to a more cohesive interaction between the hues.
“It took me a whole to figure out how the colours would interact,” Begum says. “The piece, in the front, you see ridges. You stand on the left side, you see one colour that stands out more, and as you walk around to the right, you see another.”
The reverse side of the tapestries, rather than showing the needlework of the piece, exhibits a pattern of its own. This required some experimentation, Begum says.
“The weaving technique is really interesting and fascinating how that works,” she says. “I worked with a UK-based company Dash & Miller that designed the weave. They were able to come up with the ridges.
“We had to identify a different set of rules for the back. You could have just two colours or more, but it just can't be the same as what's at the front. The two sides are woven as one. There is a front, middle and back – but even on the back, you see some of the front seeping through. The process is really interesting.”
The paintings within taking form continue these explorations of colour on linen canvases as well as medium-density fibreboard. Here, Begum lets the colour accentuate the properties of the materials they are applied on. The chips and straws of the fibreboard are highlighted in shades of pink. The linen’s tufts, meanwhile, are all the more heightened in colourful square triangle compositions.
Given her fluidity in testing colour interactions, it is surprising to hear Begum say that she “struggled with colour” when she first began delving into abstraction as an artist, veering away from her early, figurative works.
“I really struggled with colour. I felt like I was kind of living and breathing colour, from the culture that I come from growing up, partly in Bangladesh, wearing saris and salwar kameez, constantly surrounded by colour. You’d think I’d be very confident, but actually, I really struggled when I went into abstraction. I had a long list of things that I needed to explore, and one of those things was colour.”
Her first solo exhibition, Colour Codes, which was held at The Third Line in 2007, was informed by these interactions. “I used that opportunity to kind of really focus on colour and relationship with one another,” she says. Begum used various kinds of adhesive tape that she had collected from around the world, applying them in lines and coating them with resin to test colour interactions.
“That material gave me the opportunity to be more instinctive. I could peel the tape off and apply another colour. You could see things happening quite fast.”
Almost two decades later, and Begum is now marking her fifth exhibition at The Third Line with Taking Form. She returns as a globally-established artist – Begum is the winner of the 2017 Abraaj Group Art Prize, as well as a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Taking Form, as such, represents the continuing experiments of Begum’s long-standing fascination with colour. The artist calls her fifth exhibition at The Third Line a “full circle” moment, but much like the circle of the archetypal hero’s journey, Begum returns as an artist changed, more confident and certain with how she conducts her experiments, displaying a mastery over the colours that once unnerved her.
Rana Begum's exhibition Taking Form is on at The Third Line until November 10