← Raghava KK
Calling All Gods · Parsons · Opens December 10
Bengaluru --:-- New York --:--

Studio.

Indian history, impossible flowers, Guernica restaged five times, machines painted like icons, Pokémon, my own orgasm, lockdown oils and a Trojan horse carved from one tree.

Materials acrylic, oil, carved mahogany, painted AI prints

Statement

Every series here came out of something that happened to me. I do not paint an experience after I have worked through it. Painting it is how I work through it.

Making is how I say I am still here.

Index.

A selection, not everything.  ·  How the series made each other ↗

Before the series.

The archive, 1997 to 2025. Earlier work, and work not yet brought into a series. Each letter is a turn.

21 letters

Studio: paintings and sculpture by Raghava KK

01 The History Series (2011 to 2015)

Indian history, repainted after I moved to America. Founding scenes and national myths, with the cartoons let in.

I moved to America in 2009 and missed India. I started reading Ramachandra Guha and Shashi Tharoor on how my own country's history got written, and from the outside I began repainting it: the founding scenes, the national myths, the things we were taught to revere. The cartoonist in me could not leave a canon alone. This is where the collage started.

02 Impossible Bouquets (2018 to 2026)

Flowers that could never bloom in the same season, held in one vase. A Dutch still life trick, used on people and machines.

The Dutch painted bouquets that could not exist, flowers from different seasons in one vase, because a painting does not have to obey the calendar. I took the method. The question in my head was what a picture can hold together that life cannot. So I started choosing things that do not belong together and admitting them into one arrangement.

03 The Guernica Project (2015 to 2026)

Picasso's painting, restaged five times for wars he never saw. Most of them the size of his. Not the same afternoon.

I stood in front of Guernica many times over ten years and wanted to add my perspective to it. Picasso had one town and one enemy. I have several wars open on the same screen and fake news on top of them. So I kept restaging it: first for media and manipulation, then for the Siri-ocene, the age where we ask a machine what is true, and finally as La Liberté, after my own life had broken. Everything I now paint big is measured against it.

04 Sublime Machines (2017 to 2018)

Machines, painted the way icons used to be.

Around 2016 I was playing with generative code, and something a machine made moved me the way a temple does. I did not see that coming. So I painted machines with the awe I grew up with. Factories as cathedrals. It was the first time technology was what I painted, not what I painted with. A year later I was painting with robots.

05 Catch 'em if you can (2021)

Pokémon-era creatures painted big enough to argue with. Childhood, and the things we collect to become somebody.

In 2021 my children chose to move to America, and I stayed back in India. So much of my life had been built around them. Losing them was really difficult, and my idea of reality broke. I painted their culture: the creatures they collected, the one whose story is always one step ahead of him. The paintings celebrate them, and the sadness stays in. These are children dealing with their personalities, working out who they are with the tools they were handed, and how powerful they are in facing their own sadness. I was doing the same thing at forty. Here cute is the bait.

06 The Orgasm Project (2021 to 2022)

My orgasm, recorded as brainwaves and returned to oil on canvas by robots and my own hand. The one thing I thought should not be sold.

In the middle of the divorce I went to Burning Man and came back with a two hundred year plan for crypto art that nobody would build. What survived was my brother's question: if everything can be digitised, is everything for sale? So I looked for the most intimate, least sellable thing I had. Abhijeet Satani recorded my orgasm as brainwave data, Harshit Agrawal turned every neuron into a brush stroke, and at Artmatr I painted alongside robots to bring it back to canvas. It sold at Sotheby's in 2021. That is the joke and the point.

07 Edges (2020)

Oils painted under lockdown, after my work had gone formulaic and my life had come apart. Every title is a question I could not answer.

March 2020. A half million dollar commission cancelled in one call, then lockdown, and underneath both the real problem: my work had become predictable, even to me. My brother Dr. Karthik, back in Bengaluru, set me exercises the way a critic would run a lab. A whiteboard asked who I was and answered with three words: play, pain, the construction of identity. I picked up oil paint for the first time in my life, at forty. The Figure Series came first. Edges broke out of its margins when the canvases went dark in July.

08 The Figure Series (2020 to 2021)

Single bodies on stages that will not resolve. Built under lockdown, before Edges broke out of it.

Under lockdown, with my brother as critic and Sonia keeping the record, I rebuilt myself from paper up: pen, watercolour, then the first oils. The Figure Series is what that produced. One body at a time, Hamlet, a drunk sunflower, a figure held up by the swagger of its programmes, each on a stage that does not quite hold. Edges is the same work after it turned dark. Look at the two together. One is me learning to stand a figure up. The other is me asking where the figure ends.

09 Impossible Bouquet 2.0 (2023)

The Bouquet returns with AI in the room. Paint on digital print, shown during India Art Fair 2023.

Five years after the first Bouquets, the machine I had curated in 2018 was something I could paint with. These are AI-assisted compositions printed on cotton rag and then painted back into by hand. The argument is the same (things that cannot coexist, held in one frame), but the seams now run between me and a model. Feroze Gujral showed them at the Gujral Foundation, an official collateral event of India Art Fair 2023.

10 The Toy Trojan (2019 to 2020)

A Trojan horse carved from one three hundred year old mahogany and painted to look like a toy. What you let in because it looked like a gift.

A toy is one moulded thing, so the horse had to come out of a single log. Thirty people searched a forest for months, found a three hundred year old mahogany, held a ritual asking permission before the cut, and carried it three kilometres on foot. I had trained under a master carver in Bali the year before. The skin of the horse is everything my present is made of, at one scale: Gandhi as he appears on a currency note, Kim Jong-un, Frog Mario, a figure fleeing Guernica, the Garuda. Inside the ribcage a phoenix is being born. My children were small and I was learning that the gift and the threat arrive together.