Majumdar’s canvases of vivid chaos

The US-based artist alludes to the animosity towards those questioning majoritarianism

- Avantika Bhuyan

There is a sense of animation in Sangram Majumdar’s layered paintings. His works have a palpable feeling of movement as figures flit in and out of the canvases.

He creates frozen moments featuring hybrid creatures and anthropomorphic beings in the midst of frantic, almost chaotic, action—marching, dancing, jumping their way through the paintings. These canvases of vivid chaos are part of the show, Bad Actors, on view at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, New Delhi, till 25 July. The artist, who lives in Seattle, US, was recently awarded the Neddy Artist Award in painting—an annual award, funded by the Behnke Foundation and stewarded by the Cornish College of the Arts, and given to visual artists based in the Puget Sound region in Washington state.

Majumdar draws on the past and present realities of India, where he grew up, and the US, which he now calls home. The title of the show draws on the term “bad actor”, which in the US stands for “an immoral or delinquent figure”. “...the exhibition wishes to act, in an impulse that recalls the meticulous recasting of such stock types as badmaashes, thugs, and bandits by social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Radhika Singha, from this in-between place on the polarized present,” writes Megha Parvathy Ballakrishnen, a US-based scholar of modern and contemporary art with specialisation in South Asia, in the accompanying essay.