Assistant Professor of Painting + Drawing, Sangram Majumdar, is one of the twenty Gottlieb Foundation's 2023 Individual Support Grant Recipients.
The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation has been awarding grants to mature, creative visual artists since 1976. These awards are intended to recognize the talents of many individuals around the world who have dedicated long careers to making art and hopes to alleviate some of the financial burdens on those artists so they can devote more of their time and energies to their creative endeavors.
Each one of the 20 artists whose names and work appear below was awarded a cash grant. These individuals were selected from a group of 985 applications from 47 countries by a panel of five advisors who are themselves art professionals and who have no affiliation with the Gottlieb Foundation.
Sangram Majumdar was born in Kolkata, India. He holds a BFA from RISD and an MFA from Indiana University. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and London and has been reviewed in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic, among others. He has received numerous grants, awards, and residencies and, in 2019, was inducted into the National Academy of Design. Since 2021, he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. From 2003 to 2021, he was a full-time painting faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In January 2024 he will have his first solo exhibition in India at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai.
“Over the last twenty years, I have been making paintings that inhabit and personify a place between ‘what was’ and ‘what’s next’. The imagery has shifted from observed quotidian subjects to staged interiors to bodies in motion. I work on the paintings until they begin to feel like places embedded with time, where the old and the new coexist. More recently, the figure has taken on a more urgent role in my work, shapeshifting between appearing or assembling as a person, a character, a body, or a symbol. I adopt abstraction as a strategy to reinforce a permanent state of ambiguity resulting from obscurity, indistinctness, or imagery. I am pulling from my personal biography, my immediate surroundings, and a broader Indian heritage of art and storytelling. Painting becomes a zone where subjectivity matters and where identity is constantly being remade.”