Rana Begum to create new installation for Pallant House Gallery Staircase Commission 2024–2026- Pallant House Gallery has announced a new commission by award-winning visual artist Rana Begum RA (b. 1977), created especially for and in response to the staircase space within the Gallery’s historic townhouse.
Rana Begum’s monumental installation at Pallant House Gallery will feature her iconic suspended, colourful mesh clusters, known by many as ‘clouds’. With each configuration unique to its individual site, this work will bring vibrant colour and organic form into the 18th-century interior of the Gallery’s Queen Anne townhouse.
The material’s gridded surface will be crumpled into organic forms that spill out over the landing balcony down through the central cavity of the staircase, allowing visitors to view it from various angles. The interaction with the grand historic setting of the Grade I listed house, with its vast east facing window, will illuminate the contemporary artwork and its colours. Begum’s site-specific placement of the cloud forms will respond to the space and its natural light. The staircase will offer multiple unique viewpoints above and below the installation.
Colour and form will be layered to create moments of lightness and density that shift as the viewer navigates the staircase. There will be a sense of organic spontaneity in the work as it evolves and moves through the space, appearing to soar upwards or tumble downwards depending on your perspective.
The artist’s captivating use of texture and colour will bring a lightness and grace to the galvanised steel, transforming the industrial material into something simultaneously monolithic and weightless. The joyful colours and mesmerising shapes will create a visual response that is accessible to all.
Bangladeshi-British visual artist Begum blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture. Her distinctive visual language is characterised by repetitive geometric patterns and draws on urban landscapes as well as traditional Islamic art and architecture. Using light as a fundamental medium in her practice, Begum distils spatial and visual experiences into ordered form to produce an experience for the viewer that is both temporal and sensorial.
I’m excited to have the opportunity to engage with the staircase’s architecture and consider how the function of the space will change the experience of my work. I love how it enables a natural flow around the artwork, allowing it to be perceived from all sides. I’m drawn to the focal window and the abundance of natural light – it feels almost church-like.
I’m interested in making colour feel tangible, giving it a physicality that accentuates how one tone interacts with another… it’s always important that the relationship between colour, geometry and texture creates a feeling of calm and tranquillity. I am fascinated by this duality – how the experience of exhilaration and meditation can coexist.” “By bringing the relationship between form, colour and light into focus, I hope my work can extend beyond a gallery context and encourage the viewer to become more attuned to their everyday surroundings, more sensitive to the varying ways these three elements interact and the moments when they align to create something beautiful.
Rana Begum
In 2025 Rana Begum will be curating an exhibition drawn from the Pallant House Gallery collection to complement her installation.
Pallant House Gallery’s regular Staircase Commissions bring cutting-edge contemporary art to the heart of its historic 18th-century townhouse. Each commission rethinks the space and how people interact with objects in the Gallery. Previous commissions have included Nina Saunders, Francesco Toledo, Spencer Finch, Bouke de Vries, Clare Woods and Pablo Bronstein.
All quotes from Rana Begum are taken from a Gallery interview with the artist, which appears in Pallant House Gallery’s current Summer/Autumn 2024 Magazine.
About the artist
Born in Bangladesh in 1977, Rana Begum lives and works in London. In 1999, Begum graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design and, in 2002, gained an MFA in Painting from Slade School of Fine Art. Begum’s work distils spatial and visual experience into ordered form. Through her refined language of Minimalist abstraction, Begum blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture.
