page_title: SM Sultan
section_title: Bangladeshi period
hierarchical_section_title: SM Sultan / Career / Bangladeshi period
caption_attribution_description: English: Kids are learning painting in the academy of S. M. Sultan
context_page_description: Sheikh Mohammed Sultan, was a Bengali decolonial artist who worked in painting and drawing. His fame rests on his striking depictions of exaggeratedly muscular Bangladeshi peasants engaged in the activities of their everyday lives.Sultan's early works were influenced by western technics and forms, particularly impressionism, however, in his later works particularly, works exhibited in 1976, we discover there is a constant temptation to decolonize his art technics and forms.
  For his achievement in fine arts he was awarded with the Ekushey Padak in 1982; the Bangladesh Charu Shilpi Sangsad Award in 1986; and the Independence Day Award in 1993. His works are held in several major collections in Bangladesh, including the Bangladesh National Museum, the National Art Gallery, the S.M. Sultan Memorial Museum, and the Bengal Foundation.
context_section_description: Between Sultan's 1969 individual exhibition at the Khulna Club, Khulna, and the first National Art Exhibition (a group exhibition), in Dhaka, in 1975, a transformation took place in his work.
  Agricultural laborers engaged in everyday activities such as ploughing, planting, threshing, and fishing took center stage on his canvases. The landscape – farmland, rivers, villages – was still present, but as a backdrop. What was distinctive about his figures, such as those in Char Dakhal (1976), was their exaggeratedly muscular physique. In this way he made obvious the inner strength of the sturdy, hard working peasants, the backbone of Bangladesh, something that would have remained hidden in a more realistic depiction.
  Sultan did some of his best work in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976 the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy put on an individual exhibition of his work. It was his first major exhibition and his first in Dhaka. The next year he was selected as a member of the panel of judges for the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka. The catalog of his solo exhibition at the German Cultural Center, Dhaka, in 1987, described how he saw his subjects:
  These people who lived close to the soil, who bore on their shoulders the burden of civilization did not appear to Sultan to be weak, debilitated, starving creatures who deserved pity and sympathy. Quite the contrary, he saw their bulging muscles, their vigorous torso, their overpowering vitality, their well-rounded buttocks and swelling breasts ready to come to grip with life.
  The peasants were heroes to him. He described their place in his art:
  The matter of my paintings is about the symbol of energy. The muscle is being used for struggling, struggling with the soil. Power of those arms drives the plough into the soil and grows crops. Labor is the basis and because of that labor of our farmers this land has been surviving over thousand of years.
  Sultan's paintings never included urban elements or anything produced by modern technology, which he considered imported. They are modern art in the sense that he broke with the artistic conventions of the past, but they remained figurative art with a narrative.  He had little interest in abstract art.
caption: House of SM Sultan
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