For a 2024 exhibition in Mumbai (for which I wrote a catalog essay), Sangram Majumdar explored the contrast between visceral presence and memory’s shadow, as well as the double state of consciousness that is inherent in having to constantly realign here and there. Born in India, he moved to the United States with his family when he was 13. He is acutely aware that he is neither at home nor a complete stranger to two complex cultures and histories. It is that unstable, in-between space that he continues to explore in the 13 oil paintings and one wall drawing, dating from 2022 to 2025, on view in The Sleep of Reason, at Natalie Karg Gallery. For much of his career, Majumdar, an artist I’ve long known and covered, and included in a show I curated, was an observational painter with a broad formal range, encompassing everything from highly accomplished representational paintings to abstract images grounded in direct observation. These pieces, created through layers and fragments, invited prolonged looking while resisting interpretation. Their inchoateness mirrored his inner state of vulnerability, and the desire to be seen rather than projected upon. Sangram Majumdar, “monstermash 4” (2025), oil on canvasBuilding upon the work in the 2024 show, his current pieces are a dense bricolage of diverse sources, including images derived from using strips of different colored tape to convey the awkwardness of his child learning to walk, as well as gestures found in Western art, Persian miniatures, Indian folk art, and mass media. By studying images from different cultures and epochs, he has discovered a coherence of meaning assigned to particular expressions across many cultures, and has isolated others that are specific to geographic areas and tradition, such as Hindu art. By bringing together varied full and partial images and painterly passages, Majumdar has created layered and fractured spaces in which his figures exist. Depending on what he is pursuing, his work has featured abstraction, cartoon-like imagery, figures, and decorative patterning, sometimes in a single composition. His approach seems to be driven by the desire to hold together the many different aspects of his dual Indian-American identity, along with his recognition that it is difficult to separate the personal from the political. Can he inhabit both identities? What does it mean to do so? Sangram Majumdar, “The Meeting” (2022), oil on canvas“The Meeting” (2022), which Majumdar made in response to Gustave Courbet’s “The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet” (1854), centers on a shirtless brown-skinned man wearing pink shorts, Majumdar’s self-portrait. Courbet’s piece depicts a chance encounter between the artist, his dog, Breton, his servant, Calas, and his friend and most important patron, Alfred Bruyas. Until Courbet’s innovative work, group portraits in the European tradition were largely composed of figures posing in a room. Nothing was spontaneous or improvised. When I first saw Majumdar’s painting in 2023, I interpreted it solely through the lens of the 1854 painting. I later realized that my reading was too narrow and that it has little to do with patronage, which was Courbet’s subject. In “The Meeting,” Majumdar’s left hand extends forward from his chest, about heart height, greeted by an abstract, semi-transparent yellow shape that I saw as a gloved hand. Is it coming from a composite figure that we cannot identify? The artist, seen in profile, directs his gaze toward an unknowable space between the viewer and the compounded, abstract figure. Stuck between two disparate cultures, he does not know what to look at or take in; his mouth is open, bewildered. Sangram Majumdar, “Collaborators I” (2025), oil on canvasMajumdar wants viewers to feel some of his conflicted position in ways that seem fresh. In “Collaborators I” (2025), he depicts a woman in a jungle-like setting, among tropical leaves. She wears what looks like a gray skirt that reaches to the painting’s bottom edge and a flowery pink and violet blouse. Is she standing or kneeling. What does the upward gesture of arms and hands signify? What I find most engrossing about the work is that the woman’s head is all black, and Majumdar has painted a small blue dot near the center of it. Is her face turned away from us, revealing her dark hair? Or is she always hidden to us? The issue of visibility, and what it means, becomes the painting’s subject. Similarly mysterious are several pairs of disembodied eyes peering out at us in “Voice Over” (2025). Are they benign or dangerous? Seemingly aimed in all directions, at what are they actually looking? How and what do we and they see, and why are they staring? As he explores his identity from multiple perspectives, what roads can Majumdar travel down and what territory can he explore? These questions are central to his ambitious project. Sangram Majumdar, “Voice Over” (2025), oil on canvasSangram Majumdar: The Sleep of Reason continues at Nathalie Karg Gallery (127 Elizabeth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) though October 6. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.