At Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, “Sangram Majumdar: Offspring,” a series of essentially abstract paintings and works on paper, revealed the most recent of the Indian-born, Brooklyn-based painter’s continuing explorations of the nature of painting itself. Majumdar first announced himself with beautifully painted, complex, perceptually based interiors, made unexpected by fractured spaces and overlaps. Since then, his work has steadily moved away from explicit reference—or rather, away from logical explicit reference—while remaining about perception and experience. The recent paintings, he says, were provoked by watching his young daughter learn to walk, an effort that he read as a metaphor for negotiating the present anxiety-provoking political situation. Somehow the image of his daughter’s efforts got conflated with the walking figure of traffic lights, and all of this found its way into paintings that seem, at first, to be primarily about lushly applied expanses of (for the most part) saturated hues, punctuated with smaller incidents that conspire to suggest coherent interior or exterior spaces, before subsiding into abstractness again. Most of the works in “Offspring,” however, were haunted by the echo of a schematic striding figure—a kind of afterimage of a trajectory through a charged atmosphere, like particles that can only be studied by the traces they leave. In the best of the series, Majumdar makes this hinted-at image work both as an abstract element in the total composition and as a trigger for association. I’m curious as to whether, in future, he will move further from reference or toward more explicit allusion. Either way, the results should be worth our attention.
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