The Hudson Review - At the Galleries

Sangram Majumdar’s “The Sleep of Reason,” at Nathalie Karg Gallery, on the Lower East Side, assembled some of his most recent and strongest works to date. Majumdar has often pulsed between ambiguous abstractions and allusions to the figure, usually in fairly separate bodies of work. His recent paintings combined the two approaches in expressive ways, with imagery that occasionally hinted at his own history with brown-skinned bodies that could be seen as Indian. (Born in Kolkata, Majumdar was educated in the U.S. and lives here.) It was impossible to decide whether the exhibition name echoed Francisco Goya’s title for his nightmare images or referred to our troubled present. The mood of the paintings seemed to shift. Majumdar’s recent work is sensuously colored and constructed with rhythmic shapes, yet we are kept slightly off-balance. Figures, now explicit, now covert, sometimes fragmented, emerged from bold, emphatic planes, with complex, cursive patterning sometimes linking the two. Tiger paws loomed in one urgently layered painting. We found more and more truncated figures in the large Control, 2025, the longer we spent with the painting, discovering tumbling, minimally indicated bodies, some presented as stripped-down shapes, others conjured up with loose drawing. Stylized eyes and portions of faces flickered through smaller paintings, forcing complex, disorienting spatial readings.

However we chose to connect with these unstable, dreamlike images, we were first attracted and then held by Majumdar’s full-bore, jewel-like color—deep blues, played against purples and acid yellows, sometimes off-set with abundant white, and occasional notes of sugary pink. Smaller works on canvas and paper at times offered variants on the larger images, an approach Majumdar has long pursued, sometimes photographing a painting in progress before continuing to work on it and then taking the captured image in a different direction, while the flavor of the first version never entirely disappears. That may account for the strong family resemblance among some of the exhibition’s strongest works, despite their individuality and self-sufficiency—yet another layer of complexity in these resonant, intricate paintings.

February 25, 2026