The Third Line Gallery

Founded in 2005, The Third Line is a Dubai-based gallery that represents contemporary artists locally, regionally, and internationally. With 20 years of dedicated commitment to the arts, it has become a pioneering platform for established talent and emerging voices from the region and its diaspora. Through a dynamic program encompassing exhibitions, artist talks, and art book publishing, The Third Line fosters rich discourse around contemporary art practices from the region.

Represented artists include: Abbas Akhavan, Ala Ebtekar, Amir H. Fallah, Anuar Khalifi, Bady Dalloul, Farah Al Qasimi, Farhad Moshiri, Fouad Elkoury, Hassan Hajjaj, Hayv Kahraman, Huda Lutfi, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Jordan Nassar, Kamran Samimi, Laleh Khorramian, Lamya Gargash, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Nima Nabavi, Pouran Jinchi, Rana Begum, Sahand Hesamiyan, Sara Naim, Sarah Awad, Shirin Aliabadi, Slavs and Tatars, Sophia Al-Maria, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Vian Sora, yasiin bey, and Youssef Nabil.

The Third Line is pleased to present Rana Begum’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring a new body of works across linen, textile, wood, and paper. The exhibition continues Begum’s exploration of textiles, bringing the medium into dialogue with her ongoing interest in light, color, and material. While embracing a turn towards softness and delicacy, the works in Taking Form build on Begum's longstanding engagement with abstraction and Minimalism, continuing her exploration of light through new materials and forms. This engagement with geometry runs throughout: forms suggest patterns that extend beyond their physical boundaries. Drawing on Islamic geometry, the square and rectangle establish defined perimeters, while the configurations within them suggest a sense of continuation. The geometry is never truly contained.

Begum moves fluidly across various media such as metal, paper, wood, terracotta, and mesh. Her latest work with wool, creating large-scale tapestries, is a testament to this versatility. Suspended from the ceiling in Gallery 1, Begum’s nearly five-meter-tall tapestries draw the viewer’s gaze upwards, transforming the gallery into a vast, immersive field of cascading color. Begum’s interest in woven surfaces dates back to 2022, when she was commissioned to design seat covers and tapestries as part of the Bristol Beacon’s transformation project. Her collaboration with the textile studio Dash & Miller for the project has continued through the large-scale tapestries in Taking Form, exploring how material, color, and scale come together to create a sense of expansion within the gallery space. The tapestries are composed of colored triangles, drawing on the geometric abstraction that characterizes Begum’s visual language. These colors are not just layered but woven together using the ridging technique, resulting in a dual pattern that is revealed only as the viewer moves around them.

Adjacent to the monumental tapestries, the paper works are studies of color interaction, using watercolor marks to explore how hues respond to one another. Their pale, aqueous tones echo the labor-intensive process of combining colors in the tapestries, distilled here into just a few strokes and creating a visual link between the two rooms.

Begum continues her exploration of textiles through a series of large-scale linen paintings in Gallery 2. These works extend her longstanding interest in how paint interacts with different surfaces, from reflective mirror and glass to more absorbent materials such as wood, paper, and canvas. Here, this structure, particularly the use of overlapping triangles, is translated onto linen through layers of diluted acrylic paint. The natural, unprocessed tone and texture of the linen influence the color as it is absorbed into the weave, creating a sense of rawness and an organic quality across the surface. The resulting interplay of paint and linen allows the works to evoke the shifting qualities of light through color. Alongside the linens, a set of wooden panel paintings punctuate the space with playful accents through their smaller scale and subtle shifts in color. Though the colors themselves are light, they build upon one another, creating changes in density as more layers accumulate. The smooth surface of the wooden panels holds the paint differently, allowing for a more consistent veil of color across the surface. Together, both series create a luminous field across the gallery, with a gentle rhythm that shifts as the viewer moves through the space.

Begum has explored light throughout her practice, considering the shifting sensory effects it produces through different combinations of color, material, and scale. The works in Taking Form continue this exploration, inviting viewers to move through the galleries at their own pace and discover changing hues, forms, and rhythms along the way.

Rana Begum’s (b. 1977, Sylhet, Bangladesh; lives/ works: London, UK) work focuses on the interplay between light and color, blurring the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture. Her visual language draws from the urban landscape as well as geometric patterns from traditional Islamic art and architecture. Light is fundamental to her process. Her work moves across a wide range of media—from metal, glass, and stone to paper, wood, and textiles—each absorbing or reflecting light to produce an experience that is at once temporal and sensorial.

Begum holds a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design and an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art. Her first museum solo exhibition Space Light Colour opened at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in May 2017 and traveled to Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham, UK in July 2018. Other solo exhibitions include: Boundless Geometry, The Farjam Collection, Dubai, UAE (2026); Reflection, SCAD Museum of Art, GA, USA (2025); Ordered Form, St Albans Museum + Gallery, UK (2023); Dappled Light, The Box, Plymouth, UK (2023); Infinite Geometry, Wanås Konst, The Wanås Foundation, Sweden (2021); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2014 and 2020); Perception and Reflection, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2019); A Conversation with Light and Form, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK (2018); The Space Between, Parasol Unit, London, UK (2016); and New Works, Delfina Foundation, London, UK (2010)