Rasheed Araeen, Peter Fillingham and Chelsea Space

Chelsea Space is delighted to present new sculpture by Rasheed Araeen (b.1935) and Peter Fillingham (b. 1964), the first time that these two artists have shown their work together.

Araeen and Fillingham take very particular and sensitive approaches to how an audience encounters material, colour, space, sculpture, repetition, modularity and unit structuring. Their sculptures also contain narratives embedded in the work, which are humanist and political in nature, that can be perceived through their abstract forms.

The placement of works in relation to each other and to the architecture of Chelsea Space is modernist and formalist in approach. Rather than presenting a context or history that overshadows the artwork itself, Chelsea Space’s intention is to offer the opportunity for Araeen and Fillingham to situate their work and allow it to have what Araeen describes as “the dignity of objecthood”.

In a discussion between Fillingham and Araeen in July 2018, they talked of a ‘Chelsea Space approach’ to exhibition projects, allowing artists to reveal their processes, ideas and work and how the particular architecture of Chelsea Space has presence in this curatorial process. From this they concluded that the title of the exhibition should be simply 'Rasheed Araeen, Peter Fillingham and Chelsea Space' implying a spirit of collaboration, inclusion, equality and openness. Both artists believe in collective endeavour in their practice, whether in relation to audience participation in an exhibition or event, or between artists, technicians, writers, curators and other participants in the process of making artworks and exhibitions.