Collection: Safiuddin Ahmed

One of the pioneers of modern art in South Asia, is an underrated artist to have lived and worked in both the twentieth century and the new millennium. His towering achievements in printmaking and painting have always kept him in the conversations of the art cognoscenti. However, there is a great dearth of textual materials focused on his contribution to the visual culture of this region. It is due to such lack that his numerous masterpieces have not enjoyed full public attention. There has been little effort to survey the changing patterns of the linguistic formulation through which Safiuddin kept discovering his own voice during his lifetime. Among the publications that attempted to do so include the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy book as part of their modern masters series on him where Mahmud Al Zaman wrote an apt monograph, and the Bengal Foundation tome on him as part of the Modern Masters of Bangladesh Series followed by the biography by Syed Azizul Haque dedicated to the ace etcher and painter who, like many a great artist, chose to live his life far from the public eye.