Page 378 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

SECOND GENERATION ARTISTS 375

In this way, Kibria creates the oriental urban artwork which is romantic, self searching
and intellectual in nature He draws his inspiration from the existential aesthetics of
alienation and loneliness of the last century of the second millennium. From erosion,
misery, and fear he emerges to lyrical surface and ritualistic thoughts. He is a skilled
craftsman in the management of space flowing colors through this space create
dialogue between conscious and subconscious through sublime geometry and sharp
texture. This is the artwork of Kibria.
Main contribution to art, influence on other artists
Mohammad Kibria and few others of his generation pioneered the trend of abstract art
in this country. Kibria managed to create some uniqueness in his abstraction- he has
traversed different avenues before coming up with his own pictorial language and this
language has evolved and matured. A few generations of artists after him have taken
the main structure of his pictorial language with a view to creating their own
languages. Although Kibria creates the ‘bleak manuscripts’ of modernity, he reveals
his full-fledged Bengali mind through romanticism. We find his similarities with the
poets of the thirties - especially with Jibanananda Das. Kibria has a mild voice, his
emotions are controlled and expressed in symbols; he is still longing for beauty when
the meaning of life makes him perturbed. Kibria managed to negate the dialectics of
this Bengali-ness and abstraction of art. On top of this Kibria is in possession of a pure
urban mentality, which has given him a paradigm of metropolitan philosophy of life.
For the artists after Kibria who try to draw inspiration from his works, the negation of
this dialectics and issue of paradigm of philosophy of life become major challenges.
Each practitioner of abstract art has to try solving these problems in her/his own
unique way. These are the absolute preconditions of graduating from superficial
surface painting to visual expression born in the mind. In the sixties and seventies
artists like Abu Taher, Mohammad Mohsin, Mahmudul Haque, Abul Barq Alvi,
Kalidas Karmakar have presented various expressions of abstract art on canvas. Such
works have also been presented by Hashi Chakraborty, Kazi Ghiyas, Swapan
Choudhury, K M A Quayyum, Mominul Reza and Farida Zaman. Later on artists like
Mohammad Eunus, G. S. Kabir and Iftekharuddin Ahmed joined them. This trend
continues to this day.
We can talk about the main philosophy of Conceptual Art. Is it not exciting to find that
the proposition of art being a concept formed within the thought process of an artist
and the proposition of Kibria of art being a process born within the subconscious of
the artist are parallel to each other? Both the propositions want to stress the importance
of the process of creation in art. Apparently, the propositions take diagonally opposite
stands. Nevertheless, they have a similar point of view in iterating that art is created
through a process and the artist is not a capricious, self-willed ruler but a humble
human being nursing a process.
We would conclude by saying that the art works and thoughts on art of Mohammad
Kibria is a unique treasure in the world of our visual art.