Taking Form

The Third Line opens its autumn season with Taking Form, the fifth solo exhibition at the gallery by Rana Begum. The Bangladeshi-born artist, who is based in London, brings a new body of work across linen, textile, wood and paper, continuing a long enquiry into light, colour and material through the languages of abstraction and minimalism. The show opens on 23 September 2026, alongside the new season across Alserkal Avenue, and runs until 10 November 2026.

At the heart of the exhibition are large wool tapestries suspended from the ceiling. Their patterns draw on geometry, particularly Islamic geometric design, and are built from coloured triangles made with a ridging technique, so that two different patterns reveal themselves as the viewer walks around each piece. The tapestries were made with the textile studio Dash and Miller, building on a collaboration that began during the transformation of Bristol Beacon in 2022.

The show is spread across both of the gallery's spaces. In Gallery 1 the monumental tapestries hang alongside studies on watercolour paper that examine how colours interact. Gallery 2 turns to painting: works on linen built up from layers of diluted acrylic sit next to paintings on wooden panels, where the tones shift almost imperceptibly across the surface.

Begum was born in Sylhet in 1977 and trained at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Fine Art. Her practice, in the gallery's words, explores the interplay between light and colour, blurring the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture, and it has always drawn on urban landscapes and the geometry of Islamic art. For audiences in the Gulf, where that geometric heritage is part of everyday architecture, Taking Form offers a chance to see how one of the most internationally recognised artists of South Asian heritage translates it into soft, shifting, walk-around surfaces. The exhibition follows her 2026 solo presentation Boundless Geometry at The Farjam Collection in Dubai.