NYAB Event - Sangram Majumdar "New Work"

Sangram Majumdar "New Work"

steven harvey fine art projects

This event has ended.

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents the second solo exhibition of paintings by Sangram Majumdar. Born in 1976 in Calcutta, Majumdar is an image-based painter who received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from Indiana University and is currently on the faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art.

This new body of work ranges thematically from a portrait (Portrait Projected), to a painting that plays with geometric abstraction (Fall Into). Yet underlying all of the paintings is a complex compositional process of perceptually-based image overlays - paintings atop paintings. Majumdar’s work of ten years ago explored figure groups and crowds as subjects. In his recent work, the figures are often erased, with just traces or remnants of their presence remaining. Detailed, precisely drawn forms become pieces of a dense, but ultimately unified surface. Open spaces and voids are explored as much as accumulations of objects.

The layering of fragmentary information relates to Majumdar’s reflections on Bengali culture – the multi-day, multi-sensory religious festivals (pujas) that were part of his childhood in Calcutta. These paintings contain references to the myth of Durga – a Hindu Goddess who slayed the buffalo demon with her lion. The image layering is also an exploration of our relationship to social media, where partial knowledge becomes embedded in us – but only as fragments. The paintings in the exhibition are inter-related: we find small segments of imagery repeated and re-mixed in different ways, for example, in Smoke and Mirror and Fall Into. They become half-truths, a questioning of image and narrative, and Majumdar invites the viewer to discover what is actually there.