Aminul Islam

Aminul Islam (1931–2011) was one of the founding generation of modern Bangladeshi abstract painters — a bold, instinctive artist whose large oil paintings pulsed with energy, texture, and colour.

Born in Khulna, he studied at the Government Institute of Fine Arts in Dhaka before winning a scholarship to study in Florence, Italy, at the Accademia di Belle Arti. The experience of Italian art — Renaissance masters, contemporary abstraction — transformed his practice.

Returning to Bangladesh, he joined the faculty of the Institute of Fine Arts, Dhaka, and began developing his mature abstract style: thick impasto surfaces, palette-knife passages, and a colour sensibility shaped by the Bengali landscape — terracotta reds, river greys, monsoon greens.

His paintings are characterised by their physicality — surfaces that seem to have been wrestled into being, bearing the marks of a struggle resolved. He moved freely between gestural abstraction and more composed pictorial structures, always maintaining the energy of direct mark-making.

He received the Ekushey Padak in 1988.