Page 371 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

368 ART AND CRAFTS

b. Mohammad Kibria
Mahmudul Hossain

Short biography
Mohammad Kibria was born on 1 January 1929 at Birbhum, West Bengal, India. He
entered the Calcutta Art School (College of Arts and Crafts) in 1945 after finishing
school. His teachers in the art school included Ramendranath Chakravorty, Zainul
Abedin, Anwarul Huq, Manindra Bhushan Gupta, Rishen Chakravarty and Basanta
Ganguly among others. He graduated from the Art School in 1950.
Kibria came to Dhaka in 1951 and joined the Nawabpur Government High School as
drawing teacher. He started teaching at the Government Art Institute (now Institute of
Fine Art, Dhaka University) in 1954. In 1959, he did his higher studies in painting and
printmaking at Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in Japan. He continued to
teach at the Institute of Fine Art from 1954 and in 1987 and when it was affiliated as
an institute of Dhaka University, he was appointed professor in the Printmaking
department. Kibria formally retired from this position in 1997.
Exhibitions, awards and honors
One-man shows of Mohammad Kibria were held in 1981, 1993 and 2000 in Dhaka.
Exhibitions of his works were held abroad in Japan, Pakistan, India and former
Yugoslavia. Apart from these, his works were shown in the national art exhibitions,
Asian Art Biennales and numerous other group shows.
He was awarded the first prize in painting in the first and the second National Art
Exhibitions of Pakistan in 1957 and 1959. He was awarded the Starlem Award in the
first Young Artists’ Exhibition in Tokyo in 1959 and in 1960, he won an award in the
all-Japan print exhibition. Kibria received the President’s Award for his special
contribution in fine arts in 1969. He received Ekushey Padak in 1983 and
fig. 9.7 Independence Day Award in 1997.
Mohammad Kibria Development as an artist, influences and analysis of art works
Kibria, perhaps, has a mindset which is compatible with the 20th century metropolitan
sensibility and taste. He is an introspective, personal artist. His art works, paintings
and prints, are quiet, almost silent. His emotions are controlled - his expressions are
subtle, formal. Loneliness, rootlessness, alienation and erosion are continuously
flowing within his feelings. These feelings fight relentlessly with the simple romantic
nature of Bengal, flickers of hope and lyricism on the canvas of Kibria. At the end, his
works are the depiction of a unique urban ritual to many viewers. Resolving spatial
issues intellectually, creating the possibility of the third dimension in the two
dimensional pictorial surface, giving self-born lives to color, and sometimes intense
sensual presence of lines- all these combine into a subjective lyrical flow; this is how
he progresses with his works.