Alamgir Huque’s solo exhibition at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts in Dhaka sounds an interesting note in the artistic arena of Bangladesh, as the artist, who was a prominent art activist here some twenty years back, comes home and exhibits his works after a lapse of almost two decades. Alamgir drew the attention of art connoisseurs in Bangladesh at a very young age with his exquisite paintings and prints which referred to nature and everyday images, done in a semi-abstract format, drawn from the contemporary life in Bangladesh. He learned printmaking as his major and excelled particularly in different techniques of graphic art.

Alamgir left Bangladesh in the early 90s and settled in the city of Saskatoon in Canada. This is his first visit to Bangladesh since his migration and a transformed Alamgir, after a prolonged absence, exposes before us a host of paintings, not prints, done between 2005 and 2008. It is but natural that a creative person would go through major changes during such a long span of time and in Alamgir’s case it is not only a change of time, it is a change of space as well. A person who is an immigrant to an alien land normally suffers from the predicament of a suspended existence between belongingness and non-belongingness. When looking at Alamgir’s works we might also keep that consideration in our mind.

Alamgir’s current works do display a radical shift from his previous traits. His paintings of the last few years, showcased in the current exhibition, are done purely in a non-objective format and are rendered more or less in an abstract-expressionistic vocabulary. As the artist says that his inspiration is nature itself and pays his homage to his ‘muse’ through his creations, it could be imagined that the vast expanse of the Canadian landscape and the lack of locality, as against the densely populated scenario of a small country from which he had migrated, immensely fascinated him. He decided to eliminate objects and images from his canvases and tried to present the essence of his themes with sweeping brushstrokes and textured surfaces.

These paintings do not reveal to us the transitional phases Alamgir has definitely gone through during his artistic pursuits in a neighborhood completely unknown to him. However, it is evident that he has not forgotten to take advantage of his admission into a greater spectrum of visual and intellectual horizon. Although He was torn between the traditions and memories he was familiar with and the contemporary trends he had freshly experienced, He could readily discover that representation of the reality around him is better expressed in a language which is only partly suggestive, rejecting the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction which he himself practiced previously.

Alamgir’s abstracted surfaces give an outside impression of a vast landscape seen from a bird’s-eye-view. He organizes the elements in the landscape with fragmented shapes and scattered strokes but unites them by stringing them together with significant lines and directions. His strokes, lines and dots are simultaneously spontaneous and calculated and thus display at the same time a briskness of execution and an underlying discipline. All at once Alamgir creates an internal tension between the elements which perhaps reflects the artist’s internal state of mind. Consequently, his paintings convey together a sense of chaos and an internal order which perhaps replicate the contemporary world he faces which is always in a continuous flux.

The recent paintings by Alamgir Huque do indicate his affinity with the ‘universality’ thesis of art as propagated by the western abstractionist schools of the middle of the last century. But art has gone through radical transformations since then and the post-modern and post-colonial discourses have inspired a host of artistic inclinations and activities which display a rich variety of local contexts, techniques and materials and a completely fresh interpretation of art itself. Alamgir, standing at the crossroads of various cultures, enjoy a great opportunity of assimilating them in a momentous combination. We welcome his commitments and passions toward his creative urges, but at the same time look forward to see more significant works by him in future.

Abul Mansur