Chittrovanu Mazumdar (born 13 October 1956) is a contemporary Indian artist of Bengali-Indian and French descent. Mazumdar has been described as a "conceptual artist" and a "post-structuralist" while some critics consider it difficult to classify his oeuvre into a single artistic tradition or even into any consistent genre of his own. Mazudmar has referred to himself as an "expressionist painter" but has also said he generally prefers not to use "a particular word to qualify" his work because it comprises different kinds of media and forms,Johny ML. Methods of Memory and Materials for Recollecting. 1x1 Art Gallery. 2009. and that art is more interesting when fully given over to the viewer's own experience rather than constrained by the prescriptive power of labels.
Born in Paris, Mazumder spent most of his childhood in Kolkata and in a remote area in rural Jharkhand. He received his initial art education from his father, the renowned Indian Modernist painter Nirode Mazumdar (1916 –1982) and later, at the Calcutta Government College of Art & Craft. He first rose to prominence as a painter in the 1980s and 1990s and transitioned to installation work in the mid to late 1990s. He has often collaborated with Seagull Publications to design books and with Kolkata-based theater groups to design performance spaces. As of January 2015, he lives and works primarily in Kolkata and is associated with the 1X1 Gallery in Dubai. Major exhibitions of his work have been presented in Dubai, Kolkata, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Palo Alto, Paris, Rome, Singapore and Salzburg, among other places. His paintings are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and in several private collections internationally.
Early life and education Chittrovanu Mazumdar was born into a racially and culturally mixed family of artists and scholars. His mother Marguerite Mazumdar was French and his father, Nirode Mazumdar, a stalwart of 20th Century Indian Modern art and a founding member of the Calcutta Group, was Bengali Indian. Noted painter and art educator Shanu Lahiri and renowned Bengali novelist Kamal Kumar Majumdar were his paternal aunt and uncle, respectively.
Mazumdar was born in Paris, but spent the bulk of his childhood in Kolkata and in a tiny village in Jharkhand (then part of Bihar). He grew up in a trilingual household and read extensively in all three of his native languages (Bengali, French, and English). The eclectic nature of his cultural and intellectual heritage has significantly informed his work later in life. Poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote has written that Mazumdar "has served his apprenticeship to the grand tradition of European painting; equally, he has addressed the ingeniously achieved modernism in Santiniketan as well as the Calcutta Group."
Until he was about 12 years old, when he attended the Patha Bhavan School in Kolkata, Mazumdar was sent to a village school held in a little bamboo hut because his "father thought it would be good for [him]". He later studied art at the Calcutta Government College of Art & Craft, graduating at the top of his class in 1981. Prior to attending art college, he was taught by his father, whom he also cites as a significant creative influence.
Work Mazumdar began his professional life as a painter. His first solo show was presented in Kolkata in 1985 at the Academy of Fine Arts by Seagull Foundation for the Arts, which went on to present a dozen solo exhibitions by him throughout India over the next decade and a half. In 1991 he became the third artist in history to be invited to present at the Durbar Hall at Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. During this period, he also established his international reputation through major group exhibitions in Asia, Europe, the UAE and the United States. His first solo exhibit outside of India was presented in New York at the Bose Pacia Modern Gallery in 1997.
Since then, Mazumdar's work has been shown in twelve solo exhibitions and thirteen group exhibitions in India and abroad. In 2004, Seagull Foundation for the Arts presented his sprawling, multi-sensory installed environment New Work in an abandoned apartment building in a crowded Kolkata neighbourhood. In 2009, 1x1 Art Gallery of Dubai presented another ambitious project, the critically acclaimed undated: Nightskin. In 2012, Nightskin, which had been specifically tailored to its exhibit space, was adapted for and recreated in a space that comprised Mazudar's Kolkata studio at Ho Chi Minh Sarani and extended into the Harrington Street Arts Centre located on a floor above the studio in the same building (the new iteration of the work was titled ...and undated: Nightskin). In the summer of 2014, his expansive three month solo exhibit And what is left unsaid… was held in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (commonly known as "MACRO").
Form and style Mazumdar's paintings are sometimes created on very large canvases and the visual elements are often constructed in layers, creating the effect of being visible and shrouded at the same time. Fragmented images, collaged text and pictures, mythical iconography, abstracted and literal figuration are all built on top of each other, crowding together, yet appearing to be on separate planes of "translucent and opaque paint".
In the early to mid 1990s, although still largely focused on painting, Mazumdar was experimenting with different technologies and the use of three dimensional spaces. He collaborated on designing theater spaces, where he developed some of his technique and ideas for using sound, lighting, moving parts, digital media, and also the architectural elements, contours and traversable spaces of the exhibition venue itself.
Since the late 1990s, Mazumdar has worked mostly in multimedia installations. He has continued to produce a large number of discrete paintings, but these are usually incorporated into the larger entity of the exhibition as a whole. In some shows, he has taken groups of multiple paintings (displayed in a traditional gallery-space configuration) as well as the entire room containing the display, and turned these into components of the larger installation.
Mazumdar's installations employ a wide range of technologies and materials. He has used painted canvas and paper, poured industrial tar, mercury coated cups, aluminum reflectors, rubber, wood, wax, engine oil, brocaded textile, masonry, gold, iron, steel, motorized and mechanical devices, light bulbs, filtered light, video, CGI, soundtracks (including recognizable strands of music and recited poetry as well as human screams, traffic sounds, and jumbled noises), and massive freestanding structures such as metal towers with embedded digital content. In part because of the variety, Mazumdar's works have tended to defy categories. They are usually loosely characterized as installations or sculpted environments, but the artist himself refrains from attaching any single label to them. He says "there are paintings, sculptures, sound and light installations. Each piece tends to cross over to a new field, forcing the viewer to shift his/her position constantly."
Subjects and themes
Critical reception Business Standard calls him "one of the foremost artists of his generation."Lunch With BS: Chittrovanu Mazumdar. Business Standard. 25 August 2009. Celebrated painter M. F. Hussain, who once described Mazumdar as one of India's "most dynamic younger artists," later said of his work "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."
Poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote says Mazumdar's work inspires "a visual and conceptual excitement – a heightened, even epiphanic extension of the senses… now rarely felt in exhibitions of contemporary art. In sacrificing conceptual depth for surface flamboyance, in confusing truism with idea, in mistaking fashion for formal progress, many younger Indian artists have lost their way in a labyrinth where each forked path leads to discovery or a dead end. Mazumdar, by contrast, has never lost sight of the vital connection between reflection and practice, self-expression and self-critique; he values hesitancy, the creative rupture of one’s own certitude, over the reckless speed of unmediated production."
Soumitra Das of The Telegraph found the 2012 installation … and undated: Nightskin to be "matured and transformed into an aesthetic realization of his ideas of transience, mutability and of night being the matrix of creativity" in comparison to his earlier works from the 1990s, which Das found to be "gimmicky" in their use of "giant canvases… electric lights and other theatrical props."
Reviewing Mazumdar's Installation New Work (Kolkata, 2004), writer Aveek Sen wrote that "the work teeters on the verge of great clichés…. But then, "how clear is the line that separates great clichés of art from its great themes?"
Notable works
New Work
undated: Nightskin
Mazumdar's seminal work undated: Nightskin, debuted in Dubai in 2009 and was adapted and recreated as …and undated: Nightskin in Kolkata in 2012. The original Dubai installation was presented in a large warehouse and used the exhibition space and the surrounding desert landscape as elements of the work. The Kolkata edition was housed in Mazudar's studio at Ho Chi Minh Sarani and extended into the Harrington Street Arts Centre located on a floor above the studio.Soumitra Das. "Transience, Mutability and the Night". The Telegraph. 18 February 2012.
The exhibition stretched across two floors and included photographs, multimedia installations, tall towers (some of which were covered in lush, textured layers made of fabric), oils leaking out of boxes, and projections of video, light, and sound. One reviewer described a "crate smok[ing] like an overheated engine which might catch fire at any moment, but close inspection reveals the smoke as vapour." One room had stark white walls on which were hung a series of prints titled "One Square Kilometre" showing the decomposing carcass of a calf, photographed over a period of five days. Another room contained "large screens on which streams a restless flow of images and sound, interspersed with text." There was also a large, dark, vaulted chamber, which was intermittently illuminated with sudden flashes of rotating, coloured beams of light. In this chamber were "looming black metal towers and huge, squat black metal boxes. Moutned on wheels, yet unmoving." Video images showed burning fires, flowing waters, a sleeping girl, "banks of flowers" in brilliant hues, some primary colours, some metallic. A soundtrack with layers of indistinct words, music, and muffled noises was heard. There were aperture-like mechanical components, opening and closing, smoke, viscous liquids seeping out of boxes, and partially open windows "containing small, digital prints of natural, organic textures and materials – body parts or flowers of soil."
Nightskin constructed various spaces of "night", including images of large, twilight landscapes and intimate, trancelike moments of half-sleep. It evoked images that were alternatively comforting (like a "womb" or a "boudoir") and suffocating (like looking "down through bars at videos of people, as if they are trapped"). British historian and journalist, Lucian Harris, wrote that the work captured the moment of transition from day to night when the "equilibrium of light and dark dissolves all matter before it is recast in the skin of the night" and contemplated the "many layered mysteries of the night" that are allowed to emerge once the harsh world of daylight has been left behind "like a snake, lithe and glistening as it sheds the brittle corset of its dying scales."