SANGRAM MAJUMDAR
New Work

Sangram Majumdar’s new works, currently on view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, demonstrate a deft evolution of the painter’s pictorial sensibility. Majumdar is a painter’s painter, and his recent explorations in form and color bear this out. Intersticed passages of painterly abstraction render the artist’s heretofore principal focus, the representational world, almost unrecognizable. One work, “fall into” (2011) boasts richly textured hues of eggplant abutting olivey ochres, robin’s egg-inflected whites, and viridian greens in a horizontal cascade of objecthood; in another, “As if she’s packing” (2012), shrouds of clothing peek out at geometrically inclined angles, the figure itself codified in a visualization of painterly space. Grids, line, and a haze of scraped layering act as overall grounding elements for these atmospheric displays of pigment, the canvases worked and reworked until their original forms are forced to recede into the depths from which they first were summoned. This temporal approach lends the work an air of nostalgia—a black-and-white painting of the artist’s wife, the smallest in the show, is a likely homage to Richter—and aligns Majumdar with those image-oriented virtuosos (think Dubuffet and Guston) who have come before him.