Mofidul Hoque

Biren Shome is a soft-spoken introvert person, seemingly withdrawn from everyday life but dedicated to portraying life in canvas for more than four decades. He is not prolific, cannot produce quick art and is shy to promote his own work. He never struggles to be in the limelight. Artists like Biren Shome have an inner strength, a kind of stubbornness which help them in making their own journey in art and provide a distinct aura in their work. We are happy that such diffidence and difference has found new expressions in the 8th solo art exhibition that Biren Shome has presented before us.

While a student of the College of Arts and Crafts Biren Shome, like many of his contemporaries, was much influenced by the abstract art forms practiced by their mentor Mohammad Kibria. The late sixties of the last century in the then East Pakistan was also a period of turmoil, the popular movement of Bengali nationalism looked for multifarious forms of expression including those in art, culture and music. Biren as student was in the rank of the activists, albeit in his own way, not in the forefront but very much in the thick of the movement. During the Liberation War he worked in the publicity wing of the government-in-exile under the leadership of Quamrul Hasan, a great exponent of re-interpretation of traditional art forms. Calcutta also exposed Biren Shome to the vibrancy of various art forms as he worked with West Bengal painters in their acts of solidarity with Bangladesh. When Biren Shome returned to newly-independent Bangladesh he was inspired to depict the land, people and its struggle on the canvas. The women and landscape became recurring themes in his work but in the texture and treatment one can also feel the intensity of an abstractionist.

It is interesting to watch how Biren Shome transformed himself as an artist, moving from figurative to abstraction and gradually mingling the two in his work where realism earns deeper meaning with the interplay of colour and form. He has taken a deeper look into the things around himself and developed an eye for detail. His work at the National Herbarium might have influenced his search for details and found new reflection in his artistic pursuit.

In the current exhibition one can sense the matured Biren Shome, an artist incorporating four decades of personal and social transformation, who found rich treasures of art and life in everyday objects. How he handled that in his art with lines, forms, colour and texture is interesting to follow. The dilapidated moss-covered brick wall, rainwater washing the dusty soil, the dance of light on the leaves of the tree, the stagnant water in the pond with its flora– such small details made a deep impact on the artist. His keen observation of the interplay of forms, colour and light in those everyday scenes is his point of departure. Thus Biren Shome travels from abstraction to figurative and from figurative to abstraction of a different kind which makes his exhibition a great feat for the art connoisseurs and critics alike.