Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts celebrated its 15th founding anniversary on Pahela Baishakh (April 14). The gallery, throughout its landmark journey of a decade and a half, has tried to carry forward the fine arts movement of Bangladesh and has fruitfully collaborated and connected both the artists and the art lovers around the world.

To mark the occasion, Bengal Gallery has organised a solo exhibition of paintings by acclaimed artist Kazi Ghiyasuddin. The exhibition titled “Notation. Reconstructed”, opens today (April 18) at 6pm.      

Cultural Affairs Minister Asaduzzaman Noor and Editor of the Daily Prothom Alo Matiur Rahman will jointly inaugurate the exhibition as chief guest and special guest respectively. Abul Khair, Chairman of Bengal Foundation, will preside over the event. 

Understood to be a sensitive, fastidious and introspective painter, Ghiyasuddin believes that “the work of an artist is a crystallised experience, deep inside him or herself.” 

He has been committed to abstraction throughout the last five decades, and his complex surfaces -- whether watercolour or oil, emanate a remarkable, almost occult power. The two opposing characters of oil and water provide Ghiyasuddin with means to explore the connected dualities hidden within life, nature and the universe. Drawing in the viewer's senses and stimulating the innate human tendency, he creates patterns and builds stories. 

Completed over several years, through waves of introspection and doubt; of construction destruction and reconstruction, each oil painting is left by the artist, balanced at a precious point of mysterious beauty and harmony. 

Born in Madaripur in 1951, Kazi Ghiyasuddin completed a BFA degree from the College of Arts and Crafts, Dhaka (now the Faculty of Fine Art of University of Dhaka) and an MFA from Chittagong University. In 1975, the artist travelled to Japan to take up a scholarship from the Japanese Government. Since then, he has split his time and works between Bangladesh and Japan. After completing a second MFA in Oil Painting at Tokyo Gakugei University, the artist did a doctoral degree in Fine Arts in 1985, at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.