Kanishka Raja: I and I

The ravishing work of experimental painter Kanishka Raja.

Kanishka Raja’s ravishingly patterned work, as the artist put it, “explores the intersection of representation, craft, technology, and the gaps that occur in the transmission of information.” Conceptually heady and aesthetically alluring, Raja’s I and I series combines painting with woven, scanned, printed, embroidered, and reproduced counterparts. Raja transforms a hybrid inheritance—the postcolonial confluences of an urban Indian childhood, family roots in textile manufacturing and clothing design, liberal arts and studio education in the United States, binational footing in New York and Kolkata—into an extraordinary practice, wherein strategies of variation, repetition, reversal, and mirroring converge in “composite fields that tap into oppositions—the technological versus the handmade, original versus reproduction, and neutral versus contested.”

Lisa Fischman is the Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.