Page 71 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

68 ART AND CRAFTS

driven by carnal passions and woman who is chained by the same society. Her
paintings are not comforting, a direct manifestation of a society gone bad (fig. 1.39).
In addition to those mentioned above, there were quite a few artists during the eighties
who displayed skills in painting. Notable among them are Naima Haque (1953-),
Nasim Ahmed Nadvi (1954-), Dipa Haq (1953-1999), Showkatuzzaman (1953-2005),
Ahmed Shamsuddoha (1958-), Tajuddin Ahmed (1955-) (pl. 1.43), Golam Faruque
Bebul (1958-), Siddhartha Talukder (1958-), Hritendra Kumar Sarma (1961-), Sanjib
Datta (1961-) (pl. 1.44), Osman Pasha (1963-) and many others. At the end of the
eighties, a few more young artists in various branches of art began to draw the
attention of art connoisseurs. Noteworthy among them are Mohammad Iqbal (1967-)
(fig.1.40), Sufia Begum (1968-), Fareha Zeba (1961-), Khalid Mahmood Mithu
(1960-) (pl. 1.45), Syed Hasan Mahmud (1958-), Goutam Chakraborty (1965-),
Iftekhar Uddin (1960-), Fokhrul Islam (1964-), Nazrul Islam Aghrani (1963-), Kazi
Salahuddin Ahmed (1963-) and others. Many of them have displayed significant
proficiency and distinctiveness to date while others show promise.
5. The Nineties – Contemporary times
The revolutionary changes that have been taking place in the international art arena
since the latter half of the twentieth century began to have a significant influence in the
art world of Bangladesh beginning from the nineties. The idea of Conceptual Art has in
fact completely changed the disciplines of the traditional methods of fine art that were
prevalent for decades. For many years, visual art was practiced mainly in the distinct
branches of three different media– painting, sculpture and printmaking. Of course, many
new materials were added with the advent of the twentieth century, such as– collage or
mixed media, photography, use of found or manufactured objects, addition of light and
sound, or kinetic sculptures; however, although the distinction between the media
became unclear at some points amidst all this, it never completely vanished.
Due to conceptual artworks that the artists of the West have presented during the last
few decades of the twentieth century, not only is the media based distinction of fine
art about to be eliminated, but also the distinction between the visual arts and the
performing arts is on the verge of disappearance. Artists of fine art are now making
videos, performances, site-specific art, happenings and many types of installations and
presentations. It is not possible anymore to place these expressions of art in
conventional categories. What painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture,
manufactured objects, sound, light, film, performance are presenting us today by
disintegrating and merging into one another can in a word be termed as the ‘art piece’.
This is also what the present-day artists demand. They do not want to
compartmentalize what they execute. Instead, whether what they create is creative
artwork or not should be the only consideration– this is their demand. From the
nineties, many artists of the new generation of our country have worked in this new
global style, moreover, some of them have already shown significant potential.
Though this discussion is supposed to remain confined within the subject of painting,