Ahmed Newaz is a Bangladeshi painter, musician, teacher, designer and cultural organiser whose practice spans more than five decades. A founding member of the legendary band Souls, he has left his signature across painting and mixed media, theatre, music, design and cultural activism.
Born in 1957 in Chattogram (Chittagong), Ahmed Newaz grew up among the hills, rivers and sea of Bangladesh's port city — landscapes that still run quietly through his canvases. From an early age he was drawn equally to the visual arts and to music, two languages he has never stopped speaking in parallel.
The Souls years
In the early 1970s, in the uncertain years just after Bangladesh's independence, a group of music-obsessed young men in Chattogram set out to build something new. Ahmed Newaz was among the founders of the band that would become Souls — one of the most beloved and influential rock bands in the country's history. Playing keyboards, he helped shape the band's early sound through its formative decades.
Souls would go on to release Bangladesh's first full-length band album, Super Souls (1980), and to define a generation of Bengali rock. Ahmed Newaz's role as a founding member places him at the very origins of the country's band-music movement.
A painter's life
Alongside music, painting has been the steady centre of his life. He held his first solo exhibition in Chattogram in 1974, and in 1977 completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Chittagong, going on to teach at the Chittagong Art College and shape a generation of younger artists.
His work moves fluidly across painting, drawing and mixed media. Personal experience, memory, time and human feeling are its recurring threads — love and dissent, folk tradition and spiritual inquiry. Critics have described him as a painter of nostalgia, an artist who draws what stirs him simply and sincerely, tracing the shape of longing. For Ahmed Newaz, art is not a destination but a ceaseless way of understanding life, people and time.
Theatre, design and cultural life
Through the 1980s and beyond, his creativity spilled into stagecraft and visual identity across Chattogram's cultural life. He later founded HopeTrade, an event and design house, and earned recognition for award-winning pavilion and exhibition design. In 2017 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Concord Group for a lifetime of contribution to art and culture.
A freedom fighter as well as an artist, Ahmed Newaz belongs to the generation whose creative and civic lives were bound up with the birth of Bangladesh itself.
Echoes of Creation — the retrospective
In 2026, five decades of this work are gathered for the first time in a single solo retrospective, Echoes of Creation, at the Aloki Convention Centre in Dhaka, 29 July – 2 August 2026. Spanning painting, music, archive, fashion and cultural evenings, the exhibition is conceived as a continuous echo of feeling, memory, time and human experience — a milestone moment for the artist and for the wider arts community in Bangladesh.