Murshida Arzu Alpana

Colour is the centre of Alpana's work. She sets colours against one another and lets the relationships between them carry the picture — a confidence with the palette she brought with her from Bangladesh.

The earlier paintings unfold like friezes: overlapping scenes of figures pared down almost to pictograms, standing, lying or turning in fields of colour that give no perspective. Over the years the figure has narrowed to the head. These portraits refuse likeness; character comes from gesture, contour and movement, and feeling from colour, held at a slight distance.

In the recent work flat, ornamental colour and a growing sense of space sit side by side — a tension between the two traditions she moves between.

Murshida Arzu Alpana was born in Dhaka. She trained at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka (BFA, 1983), and at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, where she completed her MFA in 1988 under Professor K. G. Subramanian.

A DAAD scholarship brought her to Berlin in 1993. There she studied experimental art with Professor Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste — today the Universität der Künste — completing her master's in 1998. She has kept a studio in Berlin ever since, dividing her working life between Germany and Bangladesh.

She has held more than thirty solo exhibitions and taken part in around ninety group shows in museums, galleries and art fairs across Europe, the USA, Africa and Asia, and her work is held in museum collections in several countries. Alongside her own practice she has taught at the University of Dhaka and, since 2005, master's students at the University of Development Alternative in Dhaka.

Music runs alongside the painting: since 1973 she has been an enlisted singer of classical and Nazrul songs for Bangladesh Television and Radio Bangladesh. She also writes poetry and short stories.