The Hopkins Review

Sangram Majumdar’s work is hard to pin down. Just as we are convinced that his recent paintings are inventive abstractions, he makes us think about the built environment and interiors. Memories of the figure, now almost subliminal, now relatively explicit, haunt some paintings, while in others, fragments of the body—schematic hands, for example—are declaratively present. In Majumdar’s works on paper, those fragments can be repeated as drawing, almost obsessively, until they become a kind of expansive web, returning us once again to the realm of abstraction and making us reconsider our ideas about the hinted-at, elusive imagery and near-imagery of the paintings. And to enrich the mix, we begin to think about the relationship of the Kolkata-born, American-educated, and resident artist to everything from Indian miniature painting to Walk/Don’t Walk signs.

Each of these apparently contradictory elements has dominated Majumdar’s work at one time or another. Before 2013, he made perceptually based, ravishingly painted, dislocated interiors, often seen from unexpected viewpoints and occasionally inhabited by figures. These wonderfully off-kilter images were usually based on small paper dioramas, surrogate places constructed by the artist to detach himself from conventional observation. “They helped me to think of the painting as its own world,” Majumdar explained in an interview, “one step removed from where I am located.” Post-2013, his paintings have been wholly their own worlds. Their imagery has remained multivalent, but they have become autonomous and confrontational, while their space remains unstable and continues to fluctuate. The paintings read not as commentaries on our surroundings, but as gently shifting expanses, [End Page 375] enlivened by variations in the density of paint and by a vigorous touch. Majumdar has spoken of his pleasure in having abandoned working from perception. “When you’re not observing, but you have a thought in mind, then you have just to put it down. The only thing you’re observing is really the painting and the world within it. The painting becomes more about what you are willing to believe in, what surprises you. You can change it because you want to (or not), but it’s because of what’s in the painting rather than what’s in the world.”

Yet, at the same time, references flicker in and out of Majumdar’s recent paintings. Architecture has influenced the structure of some works, while a series made a few years ago was provoked by his watching his young daughter learn to walk. It’s worth remembering, though, that in some works made at about the same time as the ones related to Majumdar’s daughter, an overscaled, fraying, striding figure, which seems to emerge from a sea of urgent marks, turns out to have origins in an Indian miniature of Thakata, a princess who becomes a larger-than-life demon in the Ramayana. And that’s neither to discount occasional references to the video games the artist played growing up, nor the effect of political upheavals, the stresses of the pandemic, and the events of 2020 and early 2021. “I’m trying to trust what I’m drawn to,” Majumdar has said, “whether it’s art or other elements that have been part of my life.”

Majumdar’s refusal to ignore or exclude anything that he finds stimulating to his work, combined with his equally strong refusal to settle for the familiar or the comfortable, results in the bracing ambiguity and variousness of his art. He fully explores the implications of the most fruitful provocations in families of paintings and drawings that explore related conceptions. He dissects, disguises, or emphasizes related notions in fresh ways, transforming them as he does so. He will sometimes photograph works in progress, print the images, and use them as the basis for improvisations that respond to the various, possibly conflicting “what if I did this” notions that arise in the course of working, playing with scale, testing the limits of density and [End Page 376] sparseness or degrees of reference and abstraction. The pursuit of these wide-ranging possibilities can result in works that seem remarkably...