For an artist, determined to express her inner feelings, making the colours and shapes speak for themselves seems to be the only way feasible.
Artist Najma Akhter has taken recourse to that way to articulate her soul’s responses to the outer world. All the 61 acrylic paintings of the artist, in her ongoing solo exhibition at Bengal Shilpaya in Dhanmondi, give that impression.
Akhter has not gone to paint the ‘real’; rather she has tried to capture the essence of the ‘real’ through diverse shades and nuances of colours.
Titled Fragments of the Unknown, the paintings can easily be categorised as ‘abstract’. The artist’s intention is pretty clear; she has tried to paint the fragrance, not the flower. The difference between a flower and its fragrance, for an
artist, is a vital one. The former can get a realist’s treatment, while the latter inevitably calls for the abstract way.
To take a random example from Akhter’s paintings, The Forgotten Door is revealing. The texture of a door is present in the work. Use of smoky black, deep ash and dark red make the texture of the door resonant.
An Abandoned House, another painting at the exhibition, is also capable of evoking the same impression. The profound use of black shade for the upper part and pale red for the lower part of the canvas with a small square segment in hazy blue in contrast, work together to give a reminder that something has been abandoned.
Recounting of dim and diminished memories on canvas seems to be one of Akhter’s passion. ‘I work on my memories which, I think, can no longer be depicted in a realistic manner’, the artist shared.
Most of Akhter’s works tend to be gloomy, and most of them are done in innumerable strokes of gray, charcoal and black.
There are also canvases that are prominent with jubilant colous like red and green. The painting titled A Day of Red, Gray and Black is a canvas where exactly the same colours, as mentioned in the title, are arranged in different shades. A seemingly vivid work on display is The Green Sky over Kathmandu. A combination of yellow and green concretise the painter’s artistic intake of a sky.
The exhibition will be open for all till March 9.
-With New Age input
