Maksuda Iqbal Nipa

Art lover Nuruzzaman Kaiser had been in contact with me for a while, expressing his joy for art, more espeically by Bangladeshi artists. We agreed to meet on an unexceptionally hot day in Kuala Lumpur, to talk about art from Bangladesh, while Kaiser was still in Malaysia on business. The venue was IOI Mall Starbucks, convenient for us both.

Before he was due to leave Malaysia, Kaiser had wanted to pass a book to me. It had the intriguing title of ‘Maksuda Iqbal Nipa: Episodes of her Gaze’, and was a retrospective collection of images by the non-figurative Bangladeshi artist Maksuda Iqbal Nipa. The book had been published, with much acclaim, in Dhaka, the year before last (2016). That volume was replete with testimonies from fellow artists and well wishers, as well as featuring a concise background on the artist. On seeing such amazing images, I promptly agreed to execute the following write up for The Blue Lotus magazine, and was deeply honoured to discover that the book was signed by the artist herself.

Maksuda Iqbal Nipa: Episodes of her Gaze, is an imposing book which captures something of the artist’s thought provoking image making. It is a hard bound book and runs to over 250 pages. It is replete with a colourful dust jacket which features this artist’s exciting painting ‘Sounds of Austere Perceptions (2013), on the front cover, and is published by Enyetullah Khan’s Cosmos Foundation’s Cosmos Books, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is Maksuda Iqbal Nipa's first publication.

Before enquiring too far into Maksuda Iqbal Nipa's work, there are some salient details a reader, fresh to Bangladeshi art, might want to be apprised of. As you might recall, after independence from British rule (1947) several Muslim art teachers (from the Calcutta Art School, founded by the British in 1854) had moved into what eventually became known as Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal and East Pakistan).

Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed and the student Quamrul Hassan (all previously from the Calcutta Art School) moved to Dhaka. This eventuated in the creation of an art institute called the Dhaka Art School, in Dhaka, 1948. It was run along similar lines to that of the Calcutta Art School, and underwent several name changes over the years until, finally, in 2008, it became the Charukola, Faculty of Fine Art, which until today continues its emphasis on the mastery of naturalism.

Since those early days, the art of Bangladesh has moved from the pioneering ‘Modern’ figurative work of Zainul Abedin, characterised in paintings such as ‘Harvest’ (1934) and ‘Santal Couple’ (1951) to those exquisite socially conscious and earthy figurative works of Sheikh Mohammed Sultan (S.M.Sultan). Quamrul Hassan’s ‘Three Women 1’ (1955) leaned heavily towards the social figurative, but incorporated aspects of both Western ‘fauve’ and a latter day ‘Cubism’.

In more recent times, Maksuda Iqbal Nipa followed in the esteemed footsteps of Tahera Khanam, Rowshan Ara, Hasina Ali, Jubaida Akter Khatun and Syeda Moyeena Ahsan, the first women to be admitted to the Dhaka Art School, in1954. Following her heart, and seeking a more spiritual way of painting, Maksuda Iqbal Nipa has created an art not required to be dominated by either socially conscious figurative painting, nor to be held by conventions of subject and object, contrary to the teaching at the Dhaka Faculty of Fine Art.

You might remember that in ‘Dialogue on the New Plastic’ (‘Dialoog over de Nieuwe Beelding’), published over two issues of De Stijl magazine (1919), the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian argued that his new direction of painting’s aim was ‘To express relationships plastically through oppositions of colour and line.’ and ‘To be expressed plastically in a determinate way, relationships must be represented only through colour and line.’ Mondrian favoured the interaction of line and colour over the need for a definitive figurative subject and object. Maksuda Iqbal Nipa, in her post Japan works, demonstrates this most effectively and is shown in her collected acclaimed works, within the pages of that book ‘Maksuda Iqbal Nipa: Episodes of her Gaze’.

Maksuda Iqbal Nipa, or more commonly ‘Nipa’, as she is known, was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1975. In 1996 she completed her BFA (Drawing and Painting), at the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and in 2002 she undertook a Post-Graduate Research Course (Oil Painting), at the Aichi University of Education, Japan. In 2004, Nipa achieved her M.Ed. in Fine Arts (Painting), also at the Aichi University of Education. During her sojourn in Japan, Nipa’s artistic direction changed radically from the figurative to her own way of abstraction, like many Asian artists before her.

Japan, you might remember, was the prime motivator of Western ‘Modernism’ in Asia. It began with the Meiji Restoration, in 1868, and has influenced Asian countries such as China and, later, South East Asia with concepts of ‘Modern Art’ drawn from the West.

In Japan, Nipa’s move towards a chromic abstraction freed her to experiment with line and colour in much the way that those giants from the Bauhaus, Kandinsky and Mondrian, had advocated. Her colours spring, dance and vibrate, sometimes on very large canvases, weaving their own spiritual magic from cosmoses of colour (Pigmented Dream of Hard-edged Clarity, 2004), to ever flowing fields (Pondering Search, 2016). Nipa’s works are themselves transcendent, moving beyond mere paint on substrate, skilfully providing visual portals inciting observers to move to other planes. Nipa’s works are a triumph, a resounding crescendo of colour and line. 

Nipa’s chromatic compositions bring to mind the essence of Wassily Kandinsky’s philosophy of art. Kandinsky (in his 1910 essay ‘Concerning the Spiritual In Art’) spoke about an artist’s ‘inner life’ being expressed, its awakening and a transcendence through the medium of art. These self same spiritual expressions are evident in many of Nipa’s works, with titles eluding to their visual construct such as ‘Cerulean Wonder’, ‘Colour Haze’, ‘Traces from the Orange Botanic’, which subsequently bring to mind Kandinsky’s ‘Yellow, Red, Blue (1926), ‘White Line’ (1920) and his ‘Dreamy Improvisation’ (1913).

Though some have likened Maksuda Iqbal Nipa's works to those of the late Bangladeshi artist Mohammad Kibria (1929-2011), it is an unfair comparison. The only similarity is that both artists had inclined towards the abstract, which in itself is a large category. There are, seemingly, no other points of reference between the two artists to draw the conclusion of their similarity.

Collections of Nipa’s work may be discovered at the National Art Gallery of Bangladesh, Shilpakala Academy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh, at the Bangladesh Bank, at the Bengal Foundation, also at the Embassy of Bangladesh in Vietnam. There are  her works at the Bangladesh National Museum, and many private collections at home and abroad.

Nipa has held numerous solo and group shows in Bangladesh, and outside, especially the National Museum of Bangladesh, UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France, the Toyota Municipal Art Museum in Toyota, Japan, and at the Las Vegas Art Museum, USA, as well as the Youngone Corporation in Seoul, Korea. Nipa has been honoured by Bangladesh Mohila Porishod (Bangladesh Women’s Association) and has received numerous awards and grants from Japan, China, and Bangladesh.