I am an artist.

Raghava KK (b. 1980, Bengaluru) is a self-taught Indian artist who works between Bengaluru and New York. He began as a political cartoonist for Indian newspapers in the late 1990s, and caricature still underwrites a practice that spans painting, sculpture, performance, artist books and machine-assisted work. His painting series, from The History Series (2011) to Impossible Bouquets, The Edges and The Guernica Project, treat mythology, identity and belief as material to be restaged. In 2018 he co-founded the curatorial collective 64/1 with his brother, Dr. Karthik Kalyanaraman, and co-curated Gradient Descent at Nature Morte, New Delhi, which artnet called the first mainstream gallery show of AI-generated art. His solo exhibition Calling All Gods opens at the Anna-Maria & Stephen Kellen Gallery, Parsons School of Design, New York, on December 10, 2026. He works with Ashvita’s, Chennai, and Volte Art Projects, Dubai.

leaves out: the money, the famous names, the wounds.

Raghava KK is an Indian contemporary artist who works with Ashvita’s, Chennai, and Volte Art Projects, Dubai. His paintings are held in private collections including those of the Moroccan royal family, Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar and Paul Simon. In 2021 he became the first Indian artist to launch an NFT at Sotheby’s, New York: La petite mort, from The Orgasm Project, a painting derived from his own recorded brainwaves and executed in oil by a robot and the artist’s hand. His work has been shown at Artissima, Turin; India Art Fair; Volte, Dubai (The Guernica Project, 2022); and the Gujral Foundation, New Delhi (Impossible Bouquet 2.0, 2023). Calling All Gods, two paintings at the scale of Picasso’s Guernica shown with sculpture and zines, opens at Parsons School of Design, New York, on December 10, 2026.

leaves out: Too much. Impossible. Can’t do normal.

Raghava KK has worked with machines since 2010, when EEG sensors entered his practice. At TEDMED 2013 he showed paintings that read a viewer’s brainwaves back as image. With Artmatr, an offshoot of the MIT Media Lab, he developed SOZO, a painting machine (2015). Strange Genders, made with Harshit Agrawal, is a generative model trained on some 2,300 of his drawings of men and women; it was longlisted for the Lumen Prize in 2021. The same year, The Orgasm Project turned his recorded brainwaves into an oil painting and an NFT sold at Sotheby’s. He co-founded the startup Flipsicle (New York and Stockholm), was a partner at Roundglass, and with 64/1 co-curated Gradient Descent (2018), among the first gallery exhibitions of AI-generated art.

leaves out: paint, the hand, Bangalore.

Raghava KK is an artist and speaker. He has spoken at TED2010 (My 5 Lives as an Artist), TEDGlobal 2011 (Shake Up Your Story), TEDxSummit 2012 (What’s Your 200-Year Plan?) and TEDMED 2013, and demonstrated brainwave painting at TED2013. CNN put him on its list “TED2010: Ten fascinating people you’ve never heard of”. He has lectured at NYU, Carnegie Mellon and the École des Beaux-Arts, spoken at Nat Geo Live, and helped found and co-chaired the INK Fellows program for a decade. Netflix profiled him in The Creative Indians. He speaks on creativity, belief, plurality, and what machines are doing to art.

leaves out: the four children in two countries. The things I am not getting back.

Raghava KK has worked with children and educators since 1998, when he started a cartooning school for children. He has led workshops from Essaouira, Morocco, to New York, where he painted a school library in the Bronx for the Robin Hood Foundation’s L!brary Initiative. His iPad book Pop-It (2011), in which a shake of the screen changes a child’s parents, was called “a first-rate mind expander” by Kirkus. He taught at NuVu Studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a two-week class produced Mona Lisa 2.0, curated Shaking Up Education for TAISI (2017), helped build the INK Fellows program and Roundglass’s League of Being fellowship, and mentors the Fearless Collective.

leaves out: that my kids are better theologians than I am.

Raghava KK is the Indian artist who sold an orgasm at Sotheby’s. His collectors include Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, Paul Simon and the Moroccan royal family, and Jeff Bezos bought a painting Raghava made with him and his children. He premiered When Paintings Dance with Kamal Haasan in 1999 and has collaborated with Paul Simon and Erykah Badu. CNN put him on its list “TED2010: Ten fascinating people you’ve never heard of”; National Geographic named him an Emerging Explorer in 2013; Netflix gave him an episode of The Creative Indians. He started out drawing political cartoons for newspapers in Bangalore, for very little money.

leaves out: everything that grew out of the wounds.

Raghava KK began as a newspaper cartoonist, and the cartoonist’s line still runs through everything he makes. A self-taught artist working between Bengaluru and New York, he makes paintings, sculpture, books, performance and brainwave-driven works about identity, belief and plurality. He has spoken at TED, TEDGlobal, TEDMED and TEDx, was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2013, and in 2021 became the first Indian artist to launch an NFT at Sotheby’s. His solo exhibition Calling All Gods opens at Parsons School of Design, New York, on December 10, 2026.

leaves out: almost everything above this.