Monsur ul Karim is one of the major artists of Bangladesh. He was born in 1950 in Rajbari, a district which produced another illustrious artist, Rashid Chowdhury, who was later Karim's teacher at Chittagong University. Karim spent his childhood in Rajbari and also received his early education there. He graduated in Fine Arts from Dhaka University and subsequently completed his Master's from Chittagong University.
Monsur ul Karim has remained a painter all along, his favorite medium being oil and worked on canvas. He has not been an adventurer in style, rather his style has evolved over time. Interestingly his contribution to the First Asian Biennale in 1981 were two semi abstract paintings, based essentially on nature with faint images of small female figures. The themes also remained basically similar- nature and humans in later years. The greenery of Bangladesh, the blues of the river Padma that he would cross regularly during his trips between Rajbari and Dhaka, the white sand bars or chars on the Padma greatly influenced his palette, while the farmers in the field added life to the subject. Monsur's search for the roots distinguished him as an artist of the soil, a son of the soil.
I think he reached his creative climax in the mid-nineties, which also brought him the well-deserved recognition in winning the Grand Award at the 6th Asian Biennale in 1993, the Grand Prize at the 8th Indian Triennial International at New Delhi in 1994, and the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Award in 1994. That was the time when he developed a style- very unique indeed, in which he integrated nature and humans very creatively. The human figures were somewhat distorted in shape, sometimes with only an indication of their heads, the torsos, the hands and legs, depicted through contour lines. The canvas was often divided into two or three horizontal panels. The color selection was generally conservative, sap green, light yellow ochre with blackish lines and small patches of reds or vermilions. The story in the composition was simple and symbolic- the children of the soil. Monsur ul Karim in his present solo exhibition is a little different. He appears in fact in several variations and he is now more experimental with form and color.
In general Monsur is more colorful in this exhibition than he was ever before. He produces cool compositions, of blues and dark greens with whitish cross bars. Some of the color fields are flat, some are decorated with small forms and some also with dots. Some canvases are composed with bright and contrasting vertical bars; some have a combination of horizontal and vertical spaces. Quite a few of the compositions are basically abstract in nature, some with images of trees or human figures. In some works Mansur adds spaces decorated with irregular and unrecognizable form or image. For a change he has also tried his hand at collage, inserting some photographic image.
I have a feeling that Monsur ul Karim's works in the present exhibition shows
influence of several of his illustrious contemporary artists in Bangladesh in terms of color compositions, textural treatments, using dots, or borrowing symbolic images. However, the uniqueness of Monsur ul Karim of the nineteen nineties is also easily seen in many of the present works. Such paintings are enriched with his style of human figures- highly stylized and simplified, and flora forms. Karim shows weakness for decorating larger spaces in the canvas with multiples of small designs or symbolic forms. Despite variety of style, I am delighted to see beautiful paintings bearing some semblance to his earlier master phase, which depicted synthesis of nature and people. Mansur ul Karim was awarded Ekushey Padak in 2009, the recognition of his creative achievement as an artist.
The author is a former professor of University of Dhaka and former chairman of UGC
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