Chittrovanu Mazumdar

Chittrovanu Mazumdar (born 13 October 1956) is a Kolkata-based artist who has been active in the contemporary Indian art scene for about three decades. A series of large-scale solo exhibitions in Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai from the mid-80s to the end 90s established his reputation for innovation. His multicultural upbringing in a family of artists and writers in Kolkata and Paris, and his own restlessly seeking temperament have led to his developing an international vocabulary and grammar of art which draws on a spectrum of aesthetic, literary, and socio-cultural sources and influences.

Starting as a painter, he has since explored a broad spectrum of media and technology in his work. His references incorporate inputs from his culturally varied upbringing in Kolkata and Paris and a range of eclectic reading in three languages - French, English and Bengali. His work is characterized by major shifts in style and form – from painting to multimedia environments and sound sculpture. His paintings are to be found in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi and several private collections in India and abroad.

Life and Work

Born in Paris in 1956 to an Indian father, Nirode Mazumdar, and a French mother, Marguerite, Mazumdar has grown up with access to two different cultures. A gold medallist from the Calcutta Government College of Art, his education in art began much earlier, at home, where his father, one of the most respected avant-garde Indian artists of his time, initiated him into a life of cultural debates and intellectual discussions.

His first solo show was presented in Kolkata in 1985 at the Academy of Fine Arts, by Seagull Foundation for the Arts, who went on to present a dozen major solo exhibitions by him across the country over the next decade and a half. Milestones include his mammoth canvases conceived for the historical vaulted halls of Victoria Memorial Durbar Hall in Kolkata; canvases using poured industrial tar along with metal and digital prints; and more recently, installed environments employing projections, looped sound, and large free-standing metal towers embedded with digital works.

Critical Response

Business Standard calls him, ‘one of the foremost artists of his generation’^[1](http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/lunchbs-chittrovanu-mazumdar/367988/) and celebrated painter M. F. Hussain has gone on record to say that he considers Mazumdar first amongst the artists after him. ‘Underlying his many shifts in medium, form and style over the years is a sensual intensity that reaches past the clever and the quick to probe deep layers of the human experience in all its tragi-comic universality - archetype, myth, memory, desire, betrayal, longing, ecstasy, pain. His works speak of human paradox and ambiguity, of the seeping grey of daily life that escapes the purity of black and white,’ writes arts editor Anjum Katyal, while, responding to a recent work (March 2009), scholar and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says, ‘Chittrovanu is thus in an altogether radical tradition and more radical with it, working with things, paint, pictures. He protects the trace away from the promise of the sign. This is exactly not conceptual art.’

Major exhibitions

His major solo exhibitions, starting with the most recent, include a solo art project at India Art Summit and undated: Nightskin, both presented by 1x1 Art Gallery, Dubai, in 2009; another major show by the same gallery in 2007; Various at Royal Academy of Arts, London presented by Gallery 88 in 2006; a New Delhi show in 2005 with Bodhi Art; a Bombay show with Gallery 88 and New Work presented by Seagull Foundation for the Arts (SFA) in Kolkata, both in 2004; theatre experiments with actor Vinay Sharma at the NCPA, Mumbai in 1999; Recent Works by SFA at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, and Sumukha Art Gallery, Bangalore, in 1997; Works on Paper by SFA, Kolkata also in 1997; Recent Works by SFA at Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, and Lalit Kala Academy, Madras (with Apparao Art Gallery, Madras) in 1994; a exhibition at Victoria Memorial Durbar Hall, Kolkata, presented by SFA in 1991; a show at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, by SFA in 1989; Untitled presented by Birla Academy of Art and Culture and SFA, Calcutta, in 1989 and his first exhibition, Recent Works, at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, presented by SFA in 1985.

Major group shows in which he has participated in 2009 are 1x1 Art Gallery and Hause Chelsea, Isle of Sylt, Germany, Video Wednesdays curated by Bose Krishnamachari / Johny ML, Gallery Espace, New Delhi and Re-claim / Re-cite / Re-cycle curated by Bhavna Kakar, Latitude 28 and Gallery Seven Art, New Delhi. Others include 1x1 Gallery, Dubai’s November 2008 exhibition; Altered Realities by Arts India, New York, and The New Space, 1x1, in 2006; Alchemy, Art Musings, Mumbai, in 2005; Sacred Space curated by Anupa Mehta for the RPG Academy of Art and Music, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2004; The Search Within, exhibition and symposium at Kloster Pernegg, Geras and Bildunshau St. Virgil, Salzburg, Austria, in 1998-99; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi in 1998; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 1999; and Wounds, CIMA, Kolkata and New Delhi, 1993.

Select workshops include the 2000 Khoj workshop in New Delhi and Frac Payes de la Loire, France, in 1996. He has also been active beyond the studio, collaborating in theatre design and participating in innovative publishing experiments.

References

1. ^ Business Standard, 367988.

• Business Standard. 367988