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.” Developed to accompany the exhibition Kanishka Raja: I and I on view at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College September 12–December 15, 2019.
The exhibition was co-curated by Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro '37 Director of the Davis Museum, with Laylah Ali, the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Art at Williams College, and generously supported by Wellesley College Friends of Art at the Davis, Alice Gertrude Spink Art Fund (1963), June Feinberg Stayman '48 Art Fund, Davis Museum Endowed Fund for International Cultural Programs, The Helyn MacLean Endowed Program Fund for Contemporary and South Asian Art, and The Mildred Cooper Glimcher '61 Endowed Fund. The catalogue has been realized with additional funds generously provided by Prateek and Priyanka Raja, Jane DeBevoise, and Jane Penner.
© 2022 Davis Museum at Wellesley College and the authors
Lisa Fischman
Kanishka Raja
All artwork by Kanishka Raja © Kanishka Raja
Courtesy of the Artist's Estate and Juli Raja, unless credited otherwise
All photography by Steve Briggs, unless credited otherwise
Edited by Lisa Fischman
Davis Museum
Wellesley College
106 Central Street
Wellesley, Massachusetts 02481
www.davismuseum.wellesley.edu
Designed by Stoltze Design, Boston, MA
Lithography and pre-press
by Reproline Mediateam, Unterföhring
Printed by Printer Trento
Printed in Italy
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reprinted or reproduced in any form or by an electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information retrieval systems, without prior written
permission from the copyright holders.
ISBN 978-3-7774-3999-0
Hirmer Verlag Gmbh
Nymphenburger Str. 84
80636 Munich, Germany
www.hirmerpublishers.com
