Dhaka, July 1 -- For three decades, Murshida Arzu Alpana has held her ground among Berlin's most exacting painters. Her work was selected for Reinhard Fuchs's Women in Art, a survey of masterpieces by 512 women artists across history. And this Friday, Dhaka gets a rare chance to stand in front of the work that crossing has produced.

Plenty of Bangladeshi artists are loved at home; far fewer are taken seriously abroad, on terms they don't set themselves. Alpana is one of the few - trained in Dhaka, Santiniketan and Berlin, she earned a place inside the German art establishment by its own measures, and remained, unmistakably, ours.

Born in Dhaka in 1961, she finished first in her class at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, t...