Kalidas Karmakar
Kalidas Karmakar was a painter and printmaker whose restless, experimental practice helped open contemporary printmaking in Bangladesh.
Biography
Born in Faridpur in 1946 into a family of goldsmiths and artisans, Karmakar studied at the art institute in Dhaka and graduated from the Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata in 1969. He went on to work in print studios abroad and returned with techniques — viscosity printing among them — that were then new to Bangladesh.
His work moves freely between painting, printmaking, collage, and assemblage. Sand, fabric, and metal enter the surface directly, and forms drawn from ritual objects and tantric diagrams recur across long series. The result is dense, worked, and deliberately impure.
He held his first major solo exhibition at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in 1976 and exhibited internationally for more than four decades. He received the Shilpakala Padak in 2016 and the Ekushey Padak in 2018, and died in Dhaka in 2019.
From the Collection
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