Catching clouds: Rana Begum creates new work for bank's 40,000-strong art collection

UBS
Rana Begum’s steel mesh sculpture No. 1238 Mesh was created speci cally for UBS’s 5 Broadgate office in London, and adjusted on site
Courtesy of UBS
Rana Begum is an artist who holds disparate elements in a fine balance. She plays with the hard and the soft, with taut structure and improvisation, and with solidity and intangibility. Her Mesh Clouds series—hanging forms fashioned from powder-coated steel mesh that is moulded into clouds and suspended in clusters above the viewer—is a recent development in her now two-decade-long investigation of light, space and colour.
The Mesh Clouds emerged after a period in which Begum had been creating hard-edged forms and wanted to explore more organic shapes. She had been experimenting with spray cans and felt a need to create works that could “come out into the space”, she says, “that you feel encased in”. Working with the mesh, she noticed that the forms she was shaping were “responding really beautifully to the light”. She placed one colour cloud within another. “Every time I moved, and especially when I inserted another colour inside, I thought, ‘This is really interesting.’ Then they just kept growing and growing. And the bigger they got, the more activated they became.”
A new work in the series, No. 1238 Mesh (2023), commissioned by the UBS Art Collection for the company’s London headquarters at 5 Broadgate, exemplifies this active power, transforming as viewers’ perspectives change by walking beneath it and as the light changes through the day. Initially fashioned in Begum’s East London studio, the mesh forms were then composed in direct response to the architecture and luminosity of the Broadgate space, with the hope that they would trigger a sensory response in those that encounter it. After an initial installation period, Begum returned to make adjustments with the knowledge of how the work responded to the internal space and the architecture of the city beyond. “We tried to make it as close as possible to the [audience’s] bodies so that you can really feel the movement and the drama of the piece.”
Louise Evans, UBS Art Collection Regional Manager for UK, Northern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says that Begum’s work adds to UBS’s legacy of commissioning artists for a collection that now comprises over 40,000 objects. At 5 Broadgate there is an element, Physichromie UBS Vert, from an earlier site-specific work by Carlos Cruz-Diez for a former office in Zurich in 1975, as well as the magenta light bulb sculpture Light by Michael Craig-Martin (2018), and Cerith Wyn Evans’s neon More Light Research (2019), also suspended from on high.
“It’s quite unusual that in one building you can see the history of the commissioning process,” Evans says. And Begum’s forms and subject matter were an ideal addition. “There’s an overall theme of light and colour on the ground floor, which also continues upstairs. When we were thinking about commissioning an artist for this space, Rana really was the only artist that we considered. It just seemed like her work would be a perfect fit—because of the theme but also because of how her work speaks to other works that we already had in the collection.”
Indeed, Cerith Wyn Evans’s piece helped determine Begum’s thoughts on the commission: “it just had this movement and flow” in responding to the architecture, she says. And for Begum, achieving those qualities meant much improvisation: for instance, deliberately combining unorthodox colours “in order for there to be some kind of vibration or movement”. She wanted “to embody” the drama she saw in the architecture surrounding the work. “And how do I achieve that? It is through the layering. So, when you look at it from the entrance, you can see the depth and the layers. Then, as you walk towards it, it starts expanding and stretching and the colours become lighter.” The effect, appropriately for a suspended work, is uplifting. “I feel it’s a positive, exhilarating piece,” Begum says.

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