life. Poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote has written that Mazumdar "has served his apprenticeship to the grand tradition of European painting; equally, he has addressed the ingeniously achieved modernism in Santiniketan as well as the Calcutta Group." Until he was about 12 years old, when he attended the Patha Bhavan School in Kolkata, Mazumdar was sent to a village school held in a little bamboo hut because his "father thought it would be good for [him]". He later studied art at the Calcutta Government College of Art & Craft, graduating at the top of his class in 1981. Prior to attending art college, he was taught by his father, whom he also cites as a significant creative influence. Work Mazumdar began his professional life as a painter. His first solo show was presented in Kolkata in 1985 at the Academy of Fine Arts by Seagull Foundation for the Arts, which went on to present a dozen solo exhibitions by him throughout India over the next decade and a half. In 1991 he became the third artist in history to be invited to present at the Durbar Hall at Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. During this period, he also established his international reputation through major group exhibitions in Asia, Europe, the UAE and the United States. His first solo exhibit outside of India was presented in New York at the Bose Pacia Modern Gallery in 1997. Since then, Mazumdar's work has been shown in twelve solo exhibitions and thirteen group exhibitions in India and abroad. In 2004, Seagull Foundation for the Arts presented his sprawling, multi-sensory installed environment New Work in an abandoned apartment building in a crowded Kolkata neighbourhood. In 2009, 1x1 Art Gallery of Dubai presented another ambitious project, the critically acclaimed undated: Nightskin. In 2012, Nightskin, which had been specifically tailored to its exhibit space, was adapted for and recreated in a space that comprised Mazudar's Kolkata studio at Ho Chi Minh Sarani and extended into the Harrington Street Arts Centre located on a floor above the studio in the same building (the new iteration of the work was titled ...and undated: Nightskin). In the summer of 2014, his expansive three month solo exhibit And what is left unsaid… was held in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (commonly known as "MACRO"). Form and style Mazumdar's paintings are sometimes created on very large canvases and the visual