October 28, 2018
Sangram Majumdar, who was born in Calcutta, India, in 1977, emigrated with his family to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991, when he was 13. This means that he spent his childhood and adolescence in one country and his teenage years in another. Based simply on the sights, sounds, and smells of Calcutta and Phoenix, he has two sets of memories that do not fit together. I think of him as a diasporic artist — someone who inhabits an in-between space in his work.
This is what Majumdar, an observational painter whose work often involves set-ups and staging, told the art historian John Seed in a 2012 HuffPost interview:
I have always been an image-based painter, regardless of the source, be it photography, working from life, or pure invention. Often the reason I start with something physical and actual is because it gives me something to fight against. There’s immediacy to the experience that gets actualized through paint. […] Basically, I am open to all sources. Painting for me becomes a way to undo the logic, and create a space that is interstitial and ephemeral.
Since I first reviewed his show in 2013, Majumdar has moved between figuration and abstraction, often in the same period, all while being rooted in what he calls the “physical and actual.”
Majumdar’s stagings often involve abstract forms and perceptual zones that conflate transparency with surface, making for an unsettled view, as if we are simultaneously looking through a window and at the glass it’s made of. Is a shape meant to be a representational form that is not quite decipherable, or a reflection, or simply a patch of paint?
Majumdar’s collapsing of distinctions between realism and abstraction has caused consternation among some of his peers, one of whom recently asked me: Can you explain to me exactly what’s he up to? This person felt that there is something incomprehensible about Majumdar’s project because he has neither developed a signature style nor become acceptably ambiguous.
Read full article HERE
