samindra majumdar

(b. 1966) is a visual artist who deals with semi- abstract visual language. A renowned Art activist, his paintings are, in a sense, (mis)quotes from the past. His  paintings look back to his own experiences, using abstraction and multiple layers of paint to redefine space and memory. His works tread the fine line between completely abstract and representative forms, calling into question the role that narrative threads play in experiencing art. His art evokes thoughts and feelings of a varied kind with his equally varied reinvention of lines and segments, layers and textures. His use of blue paint and undulating lines creates bodies of water that are luminescent and shimmering. He seems to have captured moments in time, and scenes that are ever-changing. 

Currently a lecturer at the Indian College of Art and Draughtsmanship, Kolkata, Samindranath Majumdar was born in 1966. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Visual Arts from Rabindra Bharti University, Kolkata, after completing a first undergraduate degree in science at Kolkata University. The artist has taken part in several solo exhibitions since his first in 1993 at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata. His shows include those held at Gallerie Ganesha, New Delhi, in 2013; Gandhara Art Gallery, Kolkata, in 2005; and Triveni Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2001. 

My works begin in an unpremeditated manner. However, in an inexplicable way, these are always inadvertently headed in the direction of landscapes. There is a certain duality about landscapes – they are timeless, and yet, they belong to individual moments of temporal experience. They are, thus, contained within the ambit of time and expand beyond it. I have tried to capture this relation of the timeless landscapes with our circumscribed life in various ways: the marks I make are also markers of rootedness, and often these resemble architecture which are both heavy and crumbling. That which is weathered by time has also witnessed the tempering of history, yet these remain etched within the landscape almost like moments of residual memory. So in a sense, it is an edifice of time that gets built within the pictorial space, an edifice that combines both creation and dissolution, experience and memory. I explore dark, tight places, heavily terranean- and these often give way to light, airy spaces, fusing the binaries of light and darkness, lightness and weight. There is a sense of the other-worldly too, as what we see is expressed in terms of what we do not see, that which exists in a different dimension. I have always wished to reach this unique plane which is my own reality, yet different from the ‘real’ as we know it. The ambient light that I have used throughout perhaps underscores this sense of in-betweenness.

Artworks