Echoes of Creation: Five Decades Gathered in One Hall
Ahmed Newaz's first full retrospective opens in Dhaka this summer — painting, music, archive, fashion and cultural evenings across five days.
For more than fifty years, Ahmed Newaz's work has been made, shown and scattered — across galleries, stages, studios and the cultural life of two cities. This summer, for the first time, it is being gathered in a single place.
Echoes of Creation, a solo retrospective of the Bangladeshi painter and musician, runs from 29 July to 2 August 2026 at the Aloki Convention Centre, 211 Gulshan–Tejgaon Link Road, Dhaka. Admission is open to all. The retrospective is a curated experience by Nook Dhaka.
The exhibition is conceived not as a tidy summing-up but as what its title suggests — a continuous echo of feeling, memory, time and human experience. Rather than a single hang of paintings, it unfolds across five strands over five days:
- Exhibition — five decades of painting and mixed-media work, much of it gathered together for the first time.
- Musical Soirées — a nod to Newaz's other life as a founding member of the band Souls.
- Fashion Presentation — design carried into cloth and form.
- Archive Collection — the documents, ephemera and traces of a working life.
- Cultural Evenings — gatherings that place the work back inside the community it came from.
That breadth is the point. Newaz has never confined himself to one medium, and the retrospective refuses to confine him either. A painter who is also a musician, teacher, designer, cultural organiser and freedom fighter, he has spent his life treating creativity as a single continuous practice rather than a set of separate careers. Echoes of Creation is the first attempt to show that whole.
For Dhaka's arts community, it is also a milestone: a chance to trace, in one continuous walk, the development of an artist whose work has quietly shaped Bangladeshi visual and musical culture for half a century. For first-time visitors, it is an introduction to a sensibility often described as the work of a "painter of nostalgia" — attentive to memory, longing, folk tradition and the human interior.
The full collection can be explored online — including a walkable 3D gallery, an augmented-reality view that places paintings on your own wall at true scale, and deep-zoom of individual works — at ahmednewaz.com, where visitors can also request an invitation.
Five decades, one hall, five days. After a lifetime of making, Echoes of Creation is finally a place to see it all at once.
Echoes of Creation — a solo retrospective by Ahmed Newaz
29 July – 2 August 2026 · Aloki Convention Centre, Dhaka · Open to all
ahmednewaz.com · info@ahmednewaz.com