Yields from 'Studio 48'

Story of life is the theme around which a group of artists from 'Studio 48' frames an exhibition that puts forward an ambivalent narrative taking its impetus from the modern medium-specific art. While works by most of the participants seemed to harness ideas connected to modernist concerns – explore as they do the linearity of relationship between image and its meaning, only a few seem to explore the multiaxial, multispatial nature of today's art practices. Yet the show comes packed with hope for the coming generation who has recently completed their Master's from the academia.

Artist Fahmida Enam kakoli, the organizer of the exhibition and the mentor for the burgeoning talents who work as a team at Studio 48, with her work attempts to cobble together the two genres – one that is linear and the other which breaks free of that constraint to, perhaps, become art-idea.

Kuntal Barai, among other participants such as Monjur Rashid, S M Ehsan, Md Khalequzzaman Shimul, and Fatima Khatun, chooses to premise his diction on defamiliarization.  The body, serves as the reference point through which he arrives at his visual solution entrenched in abstract process of letting paint to burst free out of the constraint of the contour. In couple of his acrylic on canvas works he comfortably treads a terrain liberating him from academic representational techne using tactility and bursting colour as complementary vehicles.
Khalequzzaman Shimul, on the other hand, explores modern-day trauma seemingly through the formal quality of lithography where overlapping elements refer to gash, irreversible fissure and disruption which appear in the social lithosphere.      
The current show is their second attempt to showcase works that resulted from affinities they share amongst themselves and constant interactions between the Studio members.
The exhibition was held at Asiatic Society gallery, from 30th November to 14th December 2012.

- DEPART DESK