1x1 Art Gallery and Empty10 are honored to present TRACES, an unique collection of drawings and collages by eminent artist Chittrrovanu Mazumdar.

Chittrrovanu Mazumdar’s multicultural upbringing in a family of artists and writers in Kolkata and Paris, and his own restlessly seeking temperament, have led to his developing an international vocabulary and grammar of art which unselfconsciously draws on any manner of aesthetic, literary, and socio-cultural sources and influences. His knowledge of a diverse range of textures and materials comes through in his ample usage of sound, light, videos, photography, paint and other medium to create works that do not conform to normative standards of art. Mazumdar’s perpetual desire to collate new ideas into the artistic space drives him to push the boundaries of his own mind and work.

The whole body of work may be roughly divided into different chapters. The drawings, the first lines to construct, from which breed ideas. The dwellings - homes, mono blocks, almost impregnable black masses from the outside, to fragile insecure whispers on the inside. The world of the hidden, of death, of sexuality and of the perverse. Simple lives open up, as one navigates thru different landless landscapes. The gold set, reflective of a certain light that illuminates. Photographs of objects, people, of remains of lost loves, which get together as dreams of the uncertain and unknown.  The red, almost liquid in its eminence.  From texts that can be decipherable to the unformed sign poised to become language. The white feathers - the post Lapsarian tragedy of the broken wing strewn on where once it was paradise.

“The line left behind, that scars the surface, the trace which still exists even when the shadows have moved on. Images, childhood, memories, a certain light, the past and may be a certain music, all leave an imprint, and that is the tapestry one examines, how we re-trace ourselves, to locate the present.” says Mazumdar.

In each work layers, almost like tapestry, woven to become an object in itself. They are strung, collaged, torn, added and bent to become a work as the body gets scarred in time and history, leaving only traces of its path.