The solo art exhibition by Suranjana Bhattacharja titled ‘Stitched Collage’ has begun at La Galerie, Alliance Française de Dhaka (AFD), inaugurated on Friday evening.

Renowned art critic Moinuddin Khaled, eminent artist Syed Iqbal, DU Faculty of Fine Art Professor Shishir Bhattacharjee, popular author, physicist, academic, activist Prof Dr Muhammed Zafar Iqbal and eminent artist Monirul Islam attended the opening ceremony of the exhibition as the special guests. 

Collage as a technique or form of art would be about two thousand years old. After the invention of paper, it started in China and continued through the Middle Ages, in Japan as well as in Europe, before and after the Renaissance, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with the Surrealist and Dada movements followed by Modern art.

Great artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Wassily Kandinsky among many others did each collage in their own way. Among these maestros, particularly Kandinsky’s work has always been one of the principal sources of surprise, love and inspiration for Suranjana.

Born in Narayanganj but brought up in Chittagong and then in Narsingdi, Bangladesh, Suranjana had always a penchant for sewing and got training in a technical school run by the Bangladesh Government in Narshingdi in the late eighties. About a decade ago, the artist was stricken by Dystrophy, a rare, chronic disease which caused her left hand to be partly disabled.

To fight against the disease, Suranjana started ‘stitched collage,’ a new form of art inspired by Kandinsky among others. There was a copy of a collage hanging in one of the walls of her Montreal apartment, the famous blue nude by Matisse who also did this when he was almost visually impaired, a mere coincidence, as the artist says. She was immensely motivated by that coincidence and this exhibition is a brainchild of that inspiration.

The exhibition will be open to all till Saturday, April 27, Monday to Saturday from 3 pm to 9 pm.