Sangram Majumdar & Miko Veldkamp

"How can a body be present but also have the autonomy to choose how it is seen?” The question, asked by Sangram Majumdar himself, remains to be ever-present throughout his works in Confetti in the Shade. He sees this question as an urgent necessity against the constant pressure of easy categorization and expected essentialization. The figures in Majumdar’s work shapeshift between appearing or assembling as a person, a character, a body, or a symbol. In many of them, the motif of a central, walking or standing figure functions as a structural echo. At times they are composites built with image fragments that can be traced back to people in his life, historical artworks, or casually observed moments. At other times they arrive as silhouetted gestures camouflaged by nature. This choice to resist easy identification aligns with a need to explore how it feels to be a person of color in a primarily white space. By thinking about color both metaphorically and formally, he introduces, absorbs, and fuses disparate interests. These include personal videos, Futurist and Modernist artworks, and design elements and thematic ideas from Italian frescoes and Indian illustrations. Pulling from these varied references, ‘color’ helps oscillate the pictorial space between figure and ground, line and shape, and light and space. The resulting places intentionally disorient and destabilize.

Using psychological metaphors such as shadows, reflections, and windows, Miko Veldkamp delves into his personal memories. The figures in his paintings - often after his own image, family members or non-descript and ghost-like - are in a constant state of transition, as a commentary on the genre of self portraiture. The fluid environments he depicts create a psychological space that seems idyllic at first but is charged with colonial histories. Veldkamp weaves his Surinamese, Dutch, and New York homes together, as well as his Indonesian-Dutch heritage, through family photo albums, folklore, art history, landscape and nature. His work deals with shifting notions of authenticity on the intersection of North-South and East-West, and tells personal stories of finding one’s place and voice. Starting with translucent acrylic and finishing with more opaque use of oils, Veldkamp layers his paintings in complex and playful arrangements of abstract formal and narrative figurative languages, constantly shifting between felt experience and an emotional detachment, opacity and legibility. Veldkamp’s paintings politicize the psychological and neutral. Their abstract beauty and lightness always has a political and historically (self) aware motivation.

Sangram Majumdar (b. 1976, Kolkata, IN) received his MFA from Indiana University in 2001, and his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. His work has since been exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been the recipient of several residencies and awards such as the Purchase Award (2010), the MacDowell Colony Residency (2012), and the Yaddo Residency (2012).

Miko Veldkamp (b. 1982, Suriname) received his MFA from Hunter College in 2021 and his BFA from Willem de Kooning Academie in 2005. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been the recipient of grants and awards such as Mondriaan Fund’s Research Fellowship (2013), Dr. Hendrik Muller’s Vaderlandsch Fonds (2013), and the Fonds Jong Talent Award (2012).