This new body of work ranges thematically from portraits to paintings that play with geometric abstraction. Yet underlying all of the paintings is a complex compositional process of image overlays-paintings atop paintings. Majumdar, born in 1976 in Calcutta, is an image-based painter who recieved his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from Indiana University, and is currently on the faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art.

This is the gallery’s second one-person exhibition of his work, which we have also featured in a solo presentation at PULSE New York 2011 and in several group exhibitions. Majumdar recieved a Marie Walsh Sharpe residency grant in 2010, and a Purchase Award following his inclusion in the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2010 Invitational Exhibition.

While the work that Majumdar explored ten years ago explored figure groups and crowds as subject, in his recent work, the figures are often erased, with just traces of their presence remaining.

The layering of fragemntary information relates to Majumdar’s reflections on Bengali culture-the multi-day, multi-sensory religious festivals that were part of his childhood in Calcutta. The image layering is also an exploration of our relationship to social media, where partial knowledge becomes embedded in us-but only as fragments.

The paintings in the exhibition are inter-related; we find small segments of imagery repeated and re-mixed in different ways.