Rokeya Sultana needs no introduction to Dhaka’s art scene. Of late, her abstract works have been the talk of the town – urging a discussion on our perceptions and the metaphysical construct that we call our world.

 

This exhibition highlights a collection of beautiful abstracts that depict hot gases swirling, mixing, and metamorphosing into solids – the stardust that all creatures are made of. We arrive in this world and begin to hear, and only then do sounds come to be – composing themselves into a music that is life. We open our eyes and only then do colours being to exist. Explosive beginnings in reality are followed by a rebirth, first an awareness and then an awakening – the eternal journey into the metaphysical realm.

 

Painters like to share their stories through colours, shapes, and motifs in pleasingly aesthetic compositions. Leonardo da Vinci’s golden section was a mathematical tool to understand beauty in compositions. Meanwhile in music, we have classical composers arranging notes in patterns that take our breath away, like the piano music of Chopin – delightful string and percussion notes.

But bending these notes, as with violins and wind instruments, transports us from a state of the physical and the intellectual into the realm of mystery and pure feelings.

 

Rokeya paints these mystical places of sounds and colours with fluidity, without boundaries, defying definition itself. Colours that are sometimes transparent and at others luminescent, blend into one another, often momentarily. We see the brightness of white light next to the red-hot flames that exude passion, in compositions that can only be described as awakenings. Deft use of cerulean and cobalt blues subtly portrays the artist’s search for that inner self while the cadmium yellow hints at her thirst for knowledge while suppressing sadness. Yes, it is a metaphysical realm that she paints – about a joy that comes from the awareness that we are alive in a way that the rest of physical universe is not.

 

We invite you to explore the essence of life through this beautifully mystical and the magical abstract collection.

Join us for an exhibition of the works of Rokeya Sultana, An Ode to Joy this Autumn.

We place special emphasis on ensuring physical distancing and proper safety and hygiene standards. The health and safety of the community is our top priority. 

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27 August - 7 October 2022

10 am - 8 pm

Edge Gallery, Bay’s Edgewater

Enqueries: +88 0175 569 3676