Kanishka Raja's interdisciplinary practice brought together painting and ornamental textile design, while exploring concepts of migration, liminality, and diaspora.
Read MoreRaja was born in Kolkata in 1969. His father was an illustrator and designer, and owned a large textile business in India. As a young man, Raja moved to the U.S. for study. In 1992 he completed a BA at Hampshire College, Massachusetts.
Raja completed his graduate studies at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Meadows School of the Arts, Dallas, graduating with an MFA in 1995. At SMU, Raja was trained in abstract formalism by Barnaby Fitzgerald, who fostered his understanding of the relationship between colour and surface.
In 2000, Raja undertook further study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, before later settling in New York.
Raja's multidisciplinary practice engages a plurality of ideas and processes that consider diasporic and postcolonial histories. He works across oil painting, drawing, craft, digital media, and textile printing and production. The influence of textile design and weaving techniques can be observed in Raja's approach to colour, pattern, texture, and ornamentation.
In the 2000s, Raja painted interiors in which cultural and architectural features could be seen to intersect. Devoid of human figures and filled with both Indian and American symbols and references, Raja's early paintings were distinct for their disorienting vanishing points. Many offered glimpses into ambiguous, transitory exteriors such as airports—as seen in Flying Carpet (1998), or the seven-panel oil painting, In The Future No One Will Have A Past (2007). In both paintings, the busy abstract patterns of the airport carpets nod subtly to Raja's interest in cultural textiles.
In the 'Memory Pattern' series (2005–2007), Raja documented the process of remembering through 18 near-identical canvases that originated from a photograph of a single room. Each painting in the series was composed based on Raja's memory of the painting prior, with the first copied directly from the original photograph. The assembled result of this process highlighted layers of imagined and forgotten elements, with objects moving around and shadows shifting.
Later works such as the 'Control' series (2015) present a more simplified approach to interiors, in bright, monochromatic patterns that appear to mimic the lines and patterns of architectural plans.
Raja's mixed media series, 'I and I' (2013–2015), navigates the lines between art and craft, manufactured and handmade, original and reproduction. Through multiple iterations across media including painting, weaving, printing, and embroidery, Raja repeatedly transforms images—mirroring, reversing, or repeating them in complex abstract patterns.
For I and I (Missed Twice) (2014), the artist stacked his painting of the Swiss Alps against a painting of the same vista rendered as an abstracted pattern, and fired two bullets from a .44 Magnum through the works.
Raja's panoramic 11-panel painting series and installation, 'Switzerland for Movie Stars v.1' (2012), was presented at New York's Armory Show in 2012. Inspired by the trope of natural landscapes in Hindi musicals, Raja's paintings plot an abstracted Google Maps journey from Srinagar to Geneva. He later revisited the journey in the series, 'Switzerland for Movie Stars v.2' (2014–2018).
Raja's large-scale multimedia work, Recognition Circuit (Axaxaxas mlö) (2012–2015), is permanently installed in the Clinton School for Writers and Artists, New York.
Raja has been awarded numerous prizes and artist residencies, including the 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the 2004 Digitas/ICA Artist Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the 2006 Civitella Ranieri Foundation residency in Umbertide. He was also a lecturer at the Yale School of Art.
Artist and SMU professor Brian Molanphy spoke of Raja's influence after his death from cancer in 2018, saying: 'Raja brought to the fore in national and international forums questions of displacement, migration and liminality for 20 years, beginning when these were relatively vanguard topics, leading to their ubiquity today.'
Kanishka Raja has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Ground Control, Experimenter, Kolkata (2022); PostWest, v.2a: Ornament and Translation, Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, New York (2017); Switzerland For Movie Stars (from Aziz Petrol Pump to Hazrat Saeen Saheli), University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2013); Momentum3: Kanishka Raja, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005).
Group exhibitions include Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora, Asia Society Museum, New York (2017); Counterparts: Emerging Painters & Their Influences, Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (2007); Fables, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2006); Snapshots, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore (2000).
Kanishka Raja's website can be found here, and his Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
