DOT Desk: The art exhibition, Breaking Ground: Modern Art in Transition, organised by Bengal Shilpalay, opened yesterday at Subir Choudhury Exhibition Hall in Dhanmondi, The Daily Star.
Riva Ganguly Das, the High Commissioner of India in Dhaka, will inaugurate the exhibition as the chief guest. Renowned artist Professor Nisar Hossain, Dean, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, will attend the event as the special guest. Breaking Ground: Modern Art in Transition will conclude on February 15, 2020. The exhibition showcases the works of modern and pioneering Bangladeshi and Indian artists in a new light. Bengali modernism was a contextual practice drawn from the subcontinent’s traditions of courtly and folk art, as well as lessons of the various modern and contemporary creative movements from the West.
The artists from the region explored tradition, reviving ancestral forms and incorporating a rich folk culture into their works, to come up with a fine balance between tradition and modernity.

Rural landscapes, geographies, people, and their connection with nature’s nuances and dimensions played an important role in defining the artists’ approach. The geometric organisation of forms were often replaced by organic sensibilities, through which sharp, precise and definite shapes were transformed into soft, free forms and earthy expressions. The exhibition aims to introduce the aesthetic leanings of early practices, which led to the wave of modernism in art in this part of the world. The featured artists of the exhibition are Aminul Islam, Gaganendranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Kazi Abdul Baset, Mohammad Kibria, Murtaja Baseer, Qayyum Chowdhury, Quamrul Hassan, Ramkinkar Baij, Rashid Choudhury, Safiuddin Ahmed, S M Sultan and Zainul Abedin.