It is a great occasion for art lovers in Dhaka to watch the iconic Indian artist Maqbool Fida Hosain’s solo exhibition. Gallery Basilio at New DOHS has organised the exhibition, titled Artist of the Century, to quench the thirst of those who have long desired to see Fida Husain’s great series such as Madhuri, Gaja Gamini, Ganga-Jamuna and Horse.
The fortnight exhibition, inaugurated on Saturday, features 25 prints by Fida Hosain, from the private collection of artist Maksudul Ahsan, the CEO of the gallery.
MF Hosain’s serigraphy and lithograph prints demonstrate the distinctive style developed by the trend-setter, master artist through his kaleidoscopic journey of over 75 years in art. As a forerunner of the Indian Artists’ Group, MF Hosain presents Indian history through modern eyes, sometimes through nude woman figures of legends and sometimes through images of horse and nature.
Like Fida Hosain uses very bright colours in his paintings, his prints are also not exceptions to the style. Even his distinctive composition style in paintings– using sharp geometric lines to create human figures, which can be easily accessed by the average viewer—have been reflected on such prints.
Some of his prints on display also reflect the revolutionary artist’s interpretation of different religions, for which he became an ‘eyesore’ to religious bigots and was ‘forced’ to leave his motherland India, which had previously honoured MF Hosain by conferring upon him the highest civilian awards including Padma Shree, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan.
One interesting serigraph print on display titled Islam, satires the ongoing trend of derailing from the spirit of the religion. The image is of a bow-headed woman in a black veil stitching a black cloth on a table, with the holy Qur’an lying open while a brown tasbih resembles to fall down and a white pigeon is flying away.
Another display series Theroma shows distinctive features of different religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Jainism. Theroma (Islam) is the only non figurative work in the whole exhibition, and has been done following the Islamic calligraphy tradition.
MF Husain has attained a global reputation for his artistic presentation of nude paintings of Hindu goddesses. His lithograph prints such as Ganga Jamuna demonstrates his mastery of handling the myth from a contemporary outlook.
MF Husain’s show is incomplete without the Bollywood diva Madhuri Dixit. Husain’s most interesting paintings of the 90’s is the series named after Madhuri Dixit, by whom the great artist is so fascinated that it is said that Maqbool Fida watched Madhuri’s movie ‘Hum Aapke Hai Kaun’ 67 times and painted a whole series of paintings on her.
The ongoing print exhibition also features serigraph prints of the Madhuri series where the Bollywood diva has been depicted following the tradition of cinema billboards. At the initial stage of his career, Maqbool Fida Husain used to draw cinema billboards. But, later in his career, the mature artist MF Husain used the aesthetic value of such prints to deconstruct the image of his muse Madhuri.
Prints of his other popular series such as Gaja Gamini (Fida’s presentation of ideal woman) and Horse are also on display.
‘MF Husain’s son, artist Shamshad Husain, helped us a lot to organise the exhibition,’ curator of the exhibition artist Maksudul Ahsan told New Age.
Ahsan further claimed that they would organise a family exhibition for Husain and his two sons featuring original paintings in the near future.
-With New Age input
