In the beginning — first abstract works

Araeen’s path toward abstraction resembles the evolution of many modern artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like them, Araeen had to invent new ways of art-making without referring to earlier developments, because there was not enough information on modern art in Karachi. His non-figurative experiments of the 1950s came about through observation of life’s minutiae and the epiphanies contained therein. The clearest example of this evolution is Boats: Towards Abstraction (1958-1962), a series of paintings and graphic works. In many ways, this series is redolent of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Gray Tree’ from 1911, where an autumn tree slowly turns into a network of geometric lines that will form the basis of Mondrian’s approach to non-figurative painting. The series Boats: Towards Abstraction also takes a real-life motif and reduces the forms until all we see is pure movement and structure.  

Observation of his immediate surroundings also inspired My First Sculpture from 1959, a twisted metal wire Araeen found on the street. Having brought this object home, Araeen surprised even himself when he called the wire a ‘sculpture’ in answer to his mother’s question. ‘When I first picked up a twisted metal piece from the street it was an act of unthinking suddenness, a chance encounter with a thing not seen before and my move toward the object was impulsive’, Araeen said later. ‘My mind was then empty, without thinking or remembering any past experience or event’. Later, Araeen traced the wire’s origin while observing a burning trash heap on the street and noticing that the wire is what is left of a bicycle tire. In 1975 the artist recreated this event as the performance Burning Bicycle Tires, to reflect on both the sculptural qualities of found objects and the painterly properties of fire, an element that always makes a crucial appearance at key moments in Araeen’s artistic life.

Another sequence of abstract works has a different origin. Araeen remembers how he went to a Karachi park with an artist friend and watched children playing hula-hoop. Araeen and his friend got into an argument about the relative merits of this scene as something that can be recreated through painting. His friend was so impressed by the players’ movements that he wanted to depict them realistically. Araeen, however, ‘began criticizing, somewhat light-heartedly, my friend’s choice of the subject, of his bad taste, and in fact his preoccupation with painting whatever banality he saw’. He viewed it differently: ‘I saw, in my imagination, the hula-hoop dance undergoing an amazing transformation’. ‘The movement of the hula-hoop players had turned itself into some sort of upwardly whirling pure movement’. Araeen abruptly went home after this vision and produced Ham Raqs (Dance Partners) 1959, the next day, a painting that launched a new direction in his practice.

Through this chance encounter, Araeen independently discovered something that was a guiding principle of the Soviet constructivists. In El Lissitsky’s words, ‘Material form moves through space according to specific axes: along the diagonals and spirals of staircases, along the steep hills, horizontal fields, straight or curved trajectories of airplanes – meaning that material form has to adhere to the character of its movement – that is Construction itself. Non-constructive forms neither move nor stand still – they perish, they are catastrophic’. In many ways what Araeen would later call ‘Structures’ is very close to Lissitsky’s notion of ‘Construction’. But the difference lies not only in the fact that Araeen’s visual language is unique, but also in the process of decolonization that the artist is involved in. Through this work, Araeen asserts his right to be part of modernity regardless of race and class.