Nature unveiled and re-organized : Queenie's solo print exhibition

Nasima Khanam Queenie could be tagged a semi-abstract painter. Her seemingly effortless compositions bear the  skeletal footprint of the intricate organic structures of foliage and leaves. To illuminate the natural world she employs a gaze informed by the microscopic glimpses into the hidden substrate of natural life-forms. Therefore, there appears to be a defamiliarizing strategy with the creation of  mystifying settings, however much may they be overwritten with human figures  revealed on  patterned  planes.
Return to Eden is the painter's solo art exhibition at Alliance Française de Dhaka, where after a long hiatus she translates some of her earlier imagery into prints.
The painter began her career as a naturist, her works became the aesthetic vehicle for the serenity of the natural environment with its rich abundance of colours, light and shades. In her prints, the rhythmic and seductive lines allude to the patterns of the plants examined under a microscope, leading to psychological recognition of affinity with the ecosphere on the part of the onlookers. Most of the works done in relief print involve a method of direct incision onto plastic wood plates with a needle.
 

In one of her prints, men and women are shown dancing  while others are caught in a state of repose on the riverbank. The image, pastoral in content, is reflective of calm happiness, thus summoning up  an utopian otherworldliness. Another print has intertwined leaves and dots creating a fragmented visual field that invites one to look beyond the apparently visible.
The intimate relation that the viewers are able to establish with these glimpses of nature derives its resonance from the quietitude rather than the exactitude which the artist seem to resort to in the execution of her works.  
The exhibition was held at Alliance Française spanned 13-27 December 2013.