Chittrovanu Mazumdar (born 13 October 1956) is a contemporary Indian artist of Bengali-Indian and French descent. Mazumdar has been described as a "conceptual artist" and a "post-structuralist" while some critics consider it difficult to classify his oeuvre into a single artistic tradition or even into any consistent genre of his own. Mazudmar has referred to himself as an "expressionist painter" but has also said he generally prefers not to use "a particular word to qualify" his work because it comprises different kinds of media and forms, and that art is more interesting when fully given over to the viewer's own experience rather than constrained by the prescriptive power of labels. Born in Paris, Mazumder spent most of his childhood in Kolkata and in a remote area in rural Jharkhand. He received his initial art education from his father, the renowned Indian Modernist painter Nirode Mazumdar (1916 –1982) and later, at the Calcutta Government College of Art & Craft. He first rose to prominence as a painter in the 1980s and 1990s and transitioned to installation work in the mid to late 1990s. He has often collaborated with Seagull Publications to design books and with Kolkata-based theater groups to design performance spaces. As of January 2015, he lives and works primarily in Kolkata and is associated with the 1X1 Gallery in Dubai. Major exhibitions of his work have been presented in Dubai, Kolkata, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Palo Alto, Paris, Rome, Singapore and Salzburg, among other places. His paintings are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and in several private collections internationally. Early life and education Chittrovanu Mazumdar was born into a racially and culturally mixed family of artists and scholars. His mother Marguerite Mazumdar was French and his father, Nirode Mazumdar, a stalwart of 20th Century Indian Modern art and a founding member of the Calcutta Group, was Bengali Indian. Noted painter and art educator Shanu Lahiri and renowned Bengali novelist Kamal Kumar Majumdar were his paternal aunt and uncle, respectively. Mazumdar was born in Paris, but spent the bulk of his childhood in Kolkata and in a tiny village in Jharkhand (then part of Bihar). He grew up in a trilingual household and read extensively in all three of his native languages (Bengali, French, and English). The eclectic nature of his cultural and intellectual heritage has significantly informed his work later in