'Speechless': Coming together of avant-garde artists

Marsh by Queenie

Najma Akhter, one of the artists, says, "Colours are like alphabets and by arranging them together we express our feelings, emotions, hopes and fears in the form of a vision." Having studied Oriental Art, she had teachers like Abdus Sattar and Hashem Khan. Apart from them, she also had the guidance of Rafiqun Nabi. From overseas her sources of inspiration have been Miro and Matisse. She has broken the forms and only the colours remain. In Sailing she shows a boat moving out into the distance with a backdrop of gray and black. In the painting From the distant past she brings in the memories of her childhood.

Nasima Khanum Queenie's paintings have been inspired by nature although earlier she had dealt with figures. Her teachers had been Mahmudul Haque, Shahid Kabir, Qayyum Chowdhury and Abdur Razzaque. Moon and the woods has its roots in Robert Frost's poem The road not taken and it has a brown paper collage to represent tree trunks lining a gray path lit up by a partially visible moon. Marsh brings in the marshy lands in layers of yellow, orange and gray. Queenie enjoys putting in washes of water colour, adding and subtracting hues at will with strokes of her brush on handmade paper.

Shahadat Hossain, who is based in Paris and visits Dhaka from time to time, has some of his paintings included in the exhibition. He had held his third solo in Bangladesh recently. His paintings in water colour, oil and mixed media have been including more and more figures and images with the passage of time. The paintings deal with the conflicts of a tormented soul. In his work the figures are simplified and made abstract to present suffering in a metaphorical tone. He does not go in for poetic imagery or pleasant colours. His presentations are geometrical and solid. At the same time he uses symbolic and metaphorical imagery.

Qamrul Islam Nadeem has acrylic on canvas in his depiction of the courtyard in the Institute of Fine Arts, DU. Here he has used crimson red instead of green grass and startling blue where there was gray cement, along with black trees to bring in experimentation with sunset. Expression presents a mixed media study of lounging women with pen and crayon. The figures appear to be at repose after a dance class. Those who have influenced him most are Shishir Bhattacharya and Nisar Hussain.

Arup Kumar Borua has geometrical shapes which are dear to him and which represent a changing lifestyle for the artist. He plays with texture, bringing in a collage and deals with innumerable flamboyant contrasting colours like startling reds, browns and greens. Arup deals with oblongs, squares, circles and rectangles. Certain lettering that go with the composition have been added too.

Fakhrul Islam had his bold landscapes that he had done with press ink and mustard. They appeared like symphonies in lines and dots. Nadir Shahrier's depictions of birds are also moving.