Kanishka Rajaworked across media, at the intersection of representation, craft, ornament and multiple textile and printing technologies. In interconnected bodies of work that consider the visual politics of neutral and contested territories and reflect the multivalent, multi-layered hybridity of post-colonial urban spaces, Raja’s paintings and their woven, scanned, printed, embroidered and reproduced counterparts interlock in complex visual fields charged with colliding realms of the foreign and the familiar.
Kanishka Raja (1969 – 2018) born in Calcutta. Lived and worked in New York and Kolkata. Was a lecturer at the Yale School of Art. Education: Attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; 1995 Master of Fine Arts, Southern Methodist University: Meadows School of the Arts, Dallas; 1992 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2023 Ground Control, Experimenter, Colaba, Mumbai; 2022 Ground Control, Experimenter, Kolkata; 2017 PostWest, v.2a: Ornament and Translation, Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, New York State; 2013 Switzerland For Movie Stars (from Aziz Petrol Pump to Hazrat Saeen Saheli), University of the Arts, Philadelphia; 2012 PostWest, v.1: Switzerland For Movie Stars, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, The Armory Fair, New York; 2011 Kanishka Raja: Drawings, Drive-By, Boston; 2010 Against Integration, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York. Selected Group Exhibitions: 2018 Drawn from Practice, Experimenter, Kolkata; Condo New York, Experimenter; 2017 Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora, curated by Michelle Yun, Boon Hui Tan, Lawrence-Minh Davis and Jaishri Abichandani, Asia Society Museum, New York City. Select collections: Devi Arts Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. JP Morgan Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Meadows Art Museum, Dallas; Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin; Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. Awards and Residencies: 2011 Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation; 2006 Civitella Ranieri Residency, Umbertide, Italy; 2004 ICA Artist Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.