I was checking the schedule of Eindhoven's Van Abbemuseum when I saw that they are hosting a retrospective of Karachi-born artist Rasheed Araeen, who has lived in London since 1964. It made me quite excited. The next day, I found myself planning a trip to Eindhoven to see the show, "Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective."

The exhibition is the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist, featuring his works spanning over six decades, from an abstract representation of Karachi landscapes to challenging the formal, ideological, political and orientalist view of Eurocentric modernism. The exhibition is open until March 25 at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

The show consists of five chapters that focus on the artist's approaches, periods, interests, and production methods on different subjects. It starts with the beginning of his career as an artist in Karachi where he painted Pakistani landscapes. The first chapter shows how his paintings have evolved to a style where he investigated paintings between representation and abstraction of the landscape, memory, and imagination.In "Preliminary notes for a BLACK MANIFESTO" Araeen explores the relationship between the West and the third world, focusing on how Western culture is seen as the mainstream barrier to the development of those from outside the center.

Rasheed Araeen didn't study art; however, his engineering background helped him with his geometric and symmetric sculptures when he moved to London in 1964.

The relation with these geometric sculptures directly made a reference to Islamic art, particularly the Andalusian style (al-Hambra Palace), with their complex and repetitive, algorithmic patterns mostly evolved from simple cubes, lozenges. The reflection of this reference is obvious, even with the color selection of the sculptures -- blue and turquoise. They are sort of similar colors to those used in Islamic art.

An essential, perhaps the most important turning point in Rasheed Araeen's artistic life is the encounter with the books of writer and philosopher Frantz Omar Fanon, who made a big impact on the artist's life.

Araeen started to get interested in the politics of representation of the so-called Third World and post-colonialism as he also came from a former British colony. He joined the Black Panther Movement and founded the journal "Black Phoenix," which was transformed into the journal "Third Text" in 1989. It became one of the most important art publications, dealing with post-colonialism, the Third World, and ethnicity in the art world.

In the exhibition, all issues of "Third Text" are presented on a table built from of Araeen's geometrical cubic sculptures. So, next to the exhibition, this part of the show becomes a library where visitors can take part in discussions of this unique journal.All issues of "Third Text" are presented on a table built from of Araeen's geometrical cubic sculptures.

During his time in the U.K., Britain continued losing its colonies, and the country was becoming more and more diverse because of the migration flux from its former territories. Araeen's situation was also similar. He became aware of the double standards in his daily life, and his art practice evolved towards that direction, questioning the ideological, political and orientalist view of Eurocentric modernism.

Performance, using his own body, image production and text became his main mediums, such as "Preliminary notes for a BLACK MANIFESTO" (1975-1976), while "Paki Bastard" (1977) is the most explicit examples.

In "Preliminary notes for a BLACK MANIFESTO" Araeen explores the relationship between the West and the Third World. In the manifesto, he focuses on how western culture is seen as the mainstream barrier to the development of those from outside the center. He ends the manifesto by calling artists, intellectuals and thinkers to collaborate on the development of a critically engaged artistic project.

"Paki Bastard" discusses the image and the representation of Third World artists outside of the "center/west," seen as "sexualized aggressive beings," with his blindfolded photograph that was juxtaposed with two goats' images.

The exhibition ends with Araeen's latest works, "Homecoming" (2011). According to the artist, this is a return to painting, which was the initial medium of his artistic career. These paintings, called Opus, get their names from Abbasid era intellectuals from the golden age of Islamic thinking.

"Araeen's recent Opus paintings inspired from Islamic craft redirect modernism away from the West in the 20th century, repositioning it historically and geographically," the exhibition catalog reads.