The images by Nazlee Laila Mansur and Murshida Arzu Alpana were the most arresting in the otherwise pedestrian exhibition, Faces of Feminine Expressions from Bangladesh, organized by the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts and Gallery Akar Prakar (June 20-30). Mansur’s work, at a glance, appears to be charged with a reckless candour. She has a clinical eye for detail; the mirror she holds up to reality is spotlessly clean. However, on this façade of photographic fidelity, there are startling aberrations, turning the real into the surreal and the graceful into the macabre (the influence of Mark Chagall, Edvard Munch and David Hockney is evident).

A dog flees a pastoral idyll, densely overgrown with mutilated trees: peering through the film of this reality, one discovers corpses hanging upside down from the bare, ruined branches. Mansur uses suspense to turn an intensely visual field into a theatre of the grotesque. Her work, since the early Nineties, has evolved through three distinct phases, growing out of, and into, a different story each time, while allowing people and places, the fleeting and the timeless, to accrue in her eye’s mind.

In the early stages, Mansur was instinctively documentary, her art an archive of social injustices. This phase matured into the (unfortunately titled) “Bandaged Bondage” period, focusing on women’s oppression. Lovers and Dead Fishes, with a pale young man crouching over a seemingly lifeless woman, harks back to this stage. The paintings of this period are resolutely earnest and sentimental because, as she once said, “satire was unusable” for addressing the problems of a surreally corrupt nation like Bangladesh. Following the “Louis Kahn” series — named after the architect of the Bangladeshi National Assembly — Mansur has now moved into what she calls “Usable Painting”. Every image released into the market becomes part of an irrepressibly consumerist ethos. Art becomes attached to the everyday, featuring on bed-sheets, curtains, fabrics and even crockery. Mansur’s latest work thus becomes a self-consuming chamber of mirrors, where art, not life, continually replenishes art.

Murshida Arzu Alpana, probably the best-known name in modern Bangladeshi art, has been based in Germany since 1993. Combining European High Modernism — Picasso being her presiding genius — with the avant-garde traditions of Bengal (she studied at Santiniketan), she creates a globalized idiom. Her doodle-like inscriptions, showing cats, women and kettles, are reminiscent of Benodebehari Mukherjee’s paper-cuts. The doe-eyed women remind one of Jamini Roy and K.G. Subramanyan. The riparian beauty of her native land, enmeshed with its myriad flora and fauna, shimmers through the bright colours. A heart-shaped teardrop trails down the face of the woman under the veil. Her misshapen face, bloated lips and dazzling eyes strive to burst through the confines of the veil (picture).

Both Mansur and Alpana prove how ‘women artists’ can at once endorse and exceed gender politics. This sophistication is singularly lacking in the pure kitsch of Tayeba Begum Lipi’s Venus, or in the cloying literalism of Atiya Aslam Anne. The fathomless depths of the sea inspire Nasreen Begum and Farida Jaman, but the mermaids, fishing-net and dark vortices look boringly tame. Dilara Begum Jolly’s clever imitation of the kantha tradition sets the notion of art in relation to artisanship. The chilling motif of a cluster of eyes recurs in Sulekha Choudhury’s work like a curse.