exposure
The Eclectic art of Amirul Momenin Chowdhury
It was in the early 1990s that Amirul Momenin Chowdhury shifted his gaze to the sociopolitical realities of this region, and in effect, coded his ambitiously large woodcut prints with a plethora of signs and symbols, setting a new direction for his vocabulary.
During his student years, between 1989 to -90, at the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, India, from where he completed his Masters and later acquired his PHD, his initiation to this new form of eclectic art reached a high creative altitude. But, keeping things down to earth, Amirul began devising his pictorially-inclined, dizzyingly busy compositions to articulate the ongoing political creeds and their modes of representation.
These conceptually earthy and technically simple woodcut images were a way for the artist to incorporate the factual into his oeuvre, knowing full well that what is factual has a fictive dimension to it. Thus the entry into the popular images and symbols culled from posters, wall writings, and an already established artistic diction that replaced artsy representation with biting political commentary, resulted in the crowding of the work-surface in a somewhat unique manner, considering the context of the convention of political figuration that had already gained some currency in Bangladesh at that time.