Rasheed Araeen (b.1935) is an influential figure in the British art world. Regarded as one of the foremost minimalist sculptors working in Britain, Araeen's six-decade career has also seen him tirelessly experiment with painting, sculpture, performance, installation and collage.

Having migrated to London from Pakistan in 1964, Araeen viewed Britain through a postcolonial lens. This has informed much of his work which fuses Eastern and Western influences, challenging ideas about the relationship between the West and modernity. As his work became increasingly more political in the 1970s and 1980s, Araeen came to play a leading role in the British Black Arts Movement, examining the ways in which Black artists were excluded through discrimination.

Araeen trained as a civil engineer at the University of Karachi before emigrating to Britain, and these structural influences can be seen in his sculptures. Despite having no formal training, Araeen's early 'structures' – lattice cubes and towers made while working as an engineering assistant at British Petroleum – positioned him as a pioneer of British minimalism and suggest his early interest in Anthony Caro. His well-known work Boo (1969) expands upon the zig-zag diagonals of his experimental Second Structure (1966/67).

Rang Baranga, made five years after he moved to Britain, is composed of eight individual columns painted in contrasting colours; the lattice construction has been read as reflecting both western modernist movements and the repeating patterns found in Islamic art and architecture.

Araeen's early drawings reveal his wider sculptural approach. In Drawing for Sculpture from 1966, he sketched twelve cubes on grid paper, each with differently connecting lines arranged to keep the eight corners of the cube attached to each other in a range of ways.

The drawing also includes the label 'Material: Aluminium and Translucent Glass', providing an insight into Araeen's vision for the final sculptures. These sketches of cubes highlight Araeen's abstracted, modernist and playful approach to form and sculptural design.

In Rainbow from 2015, we see more of Araeen's abstractions in the form of a cube. The sculpture is constructed from wood and painted with acrylic. The vibrant colours and use of space within the gallery setting make the piece engaging and interactive for exhibition attendees. This speaks to Araeen's postcolonial modernism, the vibrant colours drawing from Eastern influences in a minimalistic way.

Participation is a key part of Araeen's sculptures, which he sees as establishing a relationship between object and viewer. Zero to Infinity (1968–2007), for example, which originally consisted of 100 latticed cubes arranged on the gallery floor, encouraged visitors to interact with the work and to move the cubes around into new configurations.

This interactive element reveals how Araeen wanted his sculpture to be more democratic, or accessible, and he has talked about how breaking the symmetry of the composition was a deliberate challenge to the rigid nature of British modernist sculpture in the 1960s.

Lovers, also from 1968, further reveals Araeen's interest in the diagonal and, although it is not strictly a participatory sculpture, it can be shown in different ways, revealing the artist's concern with motion and movement at this time.

Araeen's play with Eastern and Western motifs aligns with his postcolonial world view. His work more broadly draws attention to global issues of racial inequity by leading viewers to question their understandings of modernity and, by extension, progress, civilisation, liberalism, and other constructed pillars of Britishness.

Although Araeen was awarded several prizes – such as the John Moores prize in 1969 (for Boo) and an Arts Council award in 1978 – he received little recognition and couldn't secure gallery representation as a result of institutional racism; this led him to adopt a more overtly political viewpoint during the 1970s and 1980s. He joined the British Black Panther Movement in 1972 and made photographic collages such as When They Meet (1973), which charted his clashes with the National Front, and the seminal performance piece Paki Bastard in 1979.

In the photographic collage Fire! from 1975, Araeen commits iconoclasm by drawing, vandalising and burning the American flag.

This comment on US imperialism demonstrates Araeen's long-term commitment to a radical socialist worldview, embodied by his joining the British Black Panthers. Through Fire!, Araeen celebrates Vietnam's victory over US forces during the Vietnam War as the Vietnamese flag is revealed underneath the US one once the latter's is burned.

Araeen is also a writer and curator, with his writings – particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s, which were linked to his wider interest in liberation movements – establishing him as an important Black voice in the British arts. Following his Black Manifesto (1975–1976), which made clear the cultural impact of colonialism, he published Black Phoenix in 1978, and then founded the hugely influential journal Third Text in 1987 and Third Text Asia in 2008.

He also contributed to the British Black Arts Movement, including curating the hugely influential 'The Other Story' exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. This showcased the work of Black British artists, exposing the ways they had been marginalised in Britain and the West more broadly – and disputing the way they were presented as 'ethnic' by the British art establishment.

In 4 Ethnic Drawings from 1982, Araeen explores how the construction of the self is abstracted by the experience of being othered on racial lines in daily life in Britain.

The colourful Arabic script is in itself aesthetically attractive, but it masks the sketched male face, illuminating the ways that Araeen's culture has veiled his individual identity. This is an abstracted illustration of the lived experience of racialisation.

Araeen's well-known cruciform works of the 1980s and 1990s, which play with the modernist grid, also demonstrate his ability to juxtapose Western and Eastern motifs. In Bismullah (1988), featuring five photographs, the green and gold corner pieces draw from Islamic imagery, while the images of candles evoke Christian and Muslim religious ceremonies. These are somewhat at odds with the central image of splattered blood, which alludes to violence.

The viewer may be reminded of blood spilled between Muslim and Christian communities, in the Crusades or in the present, with the motif also evoking the idea of blood sacrifice, from stories present in Muslim and Christian texts, and of halal slaughter. Araeen invites us to rethink our assumptions about Muslim culture and to question certain racialising or othering perspectives widespread in British society. He also draws attention to the prevalence of whiteness in the art world and its hegemony in conceptions of Britishness and modernity more broadly.

In White Stallion from 1991, Araeen develops the cruciform to comment on depictions of Islamic states in Western media. Here, the central image is a collage of a cut-out from a poster of Saddam Hussein superimposed over a photograph of US General Schwarzkopf (taken from a television screen). The four corner panels are painted solid green, and the other four panels are television pictures of US AWAC 'spy' planes coming in to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, each with a collage of Urdu script at the bottom edge.

The juxtaposition of Eastern and Western imagery questions the role of the US in Iraqi and Middle Eastern politics. The central image in particular highlights the role of oil and wealth in US interests in the region, while the four images of spy planes allude to American violence in and towards Iraq. Araeen contrasts all of this with the colour green, which, for him, signals youth and innocence.

In 2018, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven staged the artist's first comprehensive survey. This accompanying video gives some sense of the breadth of Araeen's practice.

Also in 2018, he installed Rhapsody in Four Colours, a 35-metre-high geometric sculpture, at the Aga Khan Centre in London's King's Cross. His Opus series of paintings, begun in 2016, continued his interest in colourful geometric forms as well as his engagement with a broader understanding of modernism beyond Western-centric interpretations. The title of a recent exhibition at the Heong Gallery in Cambridge, 'Rasheed Araeen: A British Story', is especially interesting in the context of an artist who has consistently explored national identity.

Throughout his multifaceted career, Araeen has consistently probed ideas around modernism and activism, developing work that presents timely and poignant social commentary on Britain and the wider world through an anti-racist, socialist and postcolonial lens. It is significant that his pieces still resonate today. The endurance of racism and white cultural hegemony in Britain alongside ongoing US imperialism and global white supremacy mean that the imagery Araeen displays continues to draw attention to global injustices.

Saffron East, historian

This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation