18 Facts About Chittrovanu Mazumdar

Chittrovanu Mazumdar was born on 13 October 1956 and is a contemporary Indian artist of Bengali-Indian and French descent.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar first rose to prominence as a painter in the 1980s and 1990s and transitioned to installation work in the mid to late 1990s.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar has often collaborated with Seagull Publications to design books and with Kolkata-based theater groups to design performance spaces.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar's paintings are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and in several private collections internationally.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar was born into a racially and culturally mixed family of artists and scholars.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar was born in Paris, but spent the bulk of his childhood in Kolkata and in a tiny village in Jharkhand.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar grew up in a trilingual household and read extensively in all three of his native languages.

Until he was about 12 years old, when he attended the Patha Bhavan School in Kolkata, Chittrovanu Mazumdar was sent to a village school held in a little bamboo hut because his "father thought it would be good for [him]".

Since then, Chittrovanu Mazumdar's work has been shown in twelve solo exhibitions and thirteen group exhibitions in India and abroad.

Chittrovanu 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.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar collaborated on designing theater spaces, where he developed some of his technique and ideas for using sound, lighting, moving parts, digital media, and the architectural elements, contours and traversable spaces of the exhibition venue itself.

Since the late 1990s, Chittrovanu Mazumdar has worked mostly in multimedia installations.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar 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.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar 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, and massive freestanding structures such as metal towers with embedded digital content.

In part because of the variety, Chittrovanu Mazumdar's works have tended to defy categories.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar says The River "raises questions about how you perceive time and culture and the passing of a moment".

Chittrovanu Mazumdar is frequently involved in publishing experiments and theatre design.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar has been active in art workshops such as Khoj and Frac Payes de la Loire.