”I don’t want to create a place of foreverness, but rather a sense that this is happening now. And “nowness” is always in flux and open to changes.” Sangram Majumdar

Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke is delighted to announce Seattle-based artist Sangram Majumdar’s first solo exhibition in India, opening January 11, 2024 for Mumbai Gallery Weekend. In this new body of work figurative fragments, redacted passages, and decorative motifs create a place where the everyday and the mythic find common ground.

As someone who moved to the US as a teenager, Majumdar’s paintings embody a shared sense of double consciousness that he finds common in diasporic communities and his own personal life. The imagery is inspired by people and experiences that are part of his lived experience, against a backdrop of remembered stories and indistinct picture fragments. From one work to another, bodies appear, dissolve, and reappear, each time reshaping themselves and the spaces they inhabit along the way.

“It is this sense of permanent displacement, and the various perceptual gaps it gives rise to, that he both explores and examines in his work. Majumdar’s bricolage approach seems to me to be motivated by the desire to create an identity that unites the many different aspects of his dual identity as an Indian American. Can he be both? What does that mean? Everywhere in his paintings and drawings, we see evidence of his restless, intellectual curiosity working in tandem with his constantly probing intelligence, his empathy and humor.” writes John Yau in his essay for the exhibition catalogue.

 

Sangram Majumdar attained a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington. He has exhibited nationally and internationally for two decades, most recently showing at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York; Aicon Contemporary, New York; and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York. In 2023 he was awarded the prestigious Individual Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Majumdar is an Assistant Professor of Painting at the School of Art + Art History + Design, University of Washington, Seattle.  He lives and works in Seattle.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by poet John Yau, artist / writer / curator Ambika Trasi, and a conversation between Sangram Majumdar and artist Matt Bollinger.