World class art gallery to come up soon at New Town

The structure will come up at the Eco Park near the Herbal garden on Lake Front. The engineers of West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO) held a meeting to discuss the matter on Tuesday.

A tender to select the firm to do the job will be floated within a fortnight. The ground floor will have a spacious lobby and exhibition area. There will be space to keep tall sculptures. Chowdhury will give the final touches when the structure is ready.

There will be a space to hold workshops, an open art theatre and a cafeteria. Mamata Banerjee had said that as New Town was developing fast, there should be an art gallery where people could go and enjoy the sculptures and the ambience.

Accordingly, a space was allotted at Eco Park, the most popular destination in the city. It may be mentioned that at the behest of Banerjee, a place has been kept where the miniature replicas of the seven wonders of the world would be kept.

She had said as Bengalis visit different states, they will have a taste of important global tourist destinations.

Biswa Bangla Convention centre is also coming up at New Town which is likely to be completed by December. New Town has been declared as a smart city. It will not be out of context to mention that the state’s first art gallery, the Academy of Fine Arts was established by Lady Ranu Mookherjee in 1933.

It was initially located in a room given by the Indian Museum on rent. Later in the 1950s, the Academy was shifted to its present address on Cathedral Road following the patronage of the then Chief Minister BC Roy and the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.