“There is no time in painting. A microsecond can last forever.”
Sangram Majumdar
Posted inArt
Relearning to Draw with Strips of Colored Tape
You could say that Sangram Majumdar is learning a way of drawing in which mastery is beside the point.
Posted inArt
More than Meets the Eye
If you see lots of work by different artists, you are going to make your own connections.
Posted inArt
Rough Collages and Finished Works Cut from the Same Cloth
The expressive quality of collage across all manner of media, from literature and music to the visual arts, came to mind while viewing Rough Cut, an exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery.
Posted inArt
Necessary Ambiguity: Sangram Majumdar’s Recent Work
In a media-riddled world where images rapidly circulate, moving from momentary commodity (“gone viral”) to forgotten waste, Sangram Majumdar is interested in “what stays.”
Posted inArt
Can I Get a Witness? Working from Observation
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects is a long and narrow space, somewhere between a bowling alley and a railroad apartment, on the Lower East Side. It is within this rather confined space that Marshall Price, curator at the uptown National Academy of Art, installed eleven paintings by artists committed to working from observation. Chronologically, the artists span five decades (or generations), with Lois Dodd and Lennart Anderson, born respectively in 1927 and 1928, being the oldest. The youngest include Gideon Bok, Anna Hostvedt, Sangram Majumdar and Cindy Tower, with Bok and Tower born in the 1960s, and Hostevedt and Majumdar born in the 1970s. The other artists are Susanna Coffey, Rackstraw Downes, Stanley Lewis, Catherine Murphy, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who were born between 1938 and 1949. Together, these artists — a number of whom have been influential teachers — suggest that observational painting is a vigorous, various, and imaginative enterprise that continues to fly under the radar.
Posted inArt
The Struggle for Coherence
The other day, at a small cocktail party, a literary agent told me that he liked writers who knew and wrote for their audience. Our conversation soon sputtered out because I didn’t see any value in disagreeing with him. A few minutes later, a writer confided that he would keep working on a manuscript only if he could morally, ethically and esthetically justify what he was doing. For each of them the work itself could never be justification enough. It had to appeal to a larger power.
