Bengal Foundation presents
Second Impression, an exhibition featuring nine eminent painter-printmakers.
Participants: Monirul islam . Abul barq alvi . Shahid kabir . Mahmudul haque . Kalidas karmakar . Rokeya sultana . Anisuzzaman anis . Farzana ahmed urmi . Abdullah al bashir

You are cordially invited to the opening of Second Impression, an exhibition featuring nine eminent painter-printmakers.
Mr. Zahir Uddin Swapon, MP, Hon’ble Political Adviser to the Prime Minister, Government of Bangladesh, will inaugurate the exhibition as the Chief Guest at 6.30 PM on Thursday, 10 September 2026, at Bengal Shilpalay.

We look forward to your kind presence at the inaugural event.

Inauguration
6.30 PM, Thursday, 10 September 2026
On view until Saturday, 3 October 2026, every day from 4 to 8 PM.
Quamrul Hassan Exhibition Hall, Level 1, Bengal Shilpalay
House 42, Road 27 (new 16), Dhanmondi, Dhaka 1209

Second Impression
The Memory of Ink, the Persistence of Paint: Nine Voices in Dialogue
Exhibition Note:

The first impression is immediate and instinctive. The second impression belongs to reflection — emerging slowly after the image has settled, disclosing something unexpected.
Second Impression brings together nine artists across generations – from pioneers emerging in the 1970s to voices surfacing in the 2000s – trained in the disciplined language of the matrix, plate, and stone. In navigating the fluid space between printmaking and painting, each carries that foundational training into oil and acrylic, not as a separate career, but as an extension of the same creative eye.
Where painting traditionally relies on direct gesture, printmaking demands an indirect patience born of iteration. Brought to the canvas, a printmaker’s obsession with structure resurfaces as architecture; patient layering becomes atmosphere; an incised line returns as gesture. This destabilises the myth of a singular ‘perfect’ work, treating the easel as an open, systemic exploration. To exhibit only prints or only paintings is to present half a sentence; this show insists on the whole sentence – the impression made twice by the same hand.
In a rapidly expanding Bangladeshi art scene that often favours the singular, marketable painting, this exhibition acts as a deliberate intervention. It positions printmaking not as a minor cousin, but as painting’s origin and equal. Crucially, it situates itself within a new heterogeneous ensemble of subjective positions, challenging any ‘exclusive vision’ and shifting how the second impression is valued, remembered, and seen.