Figuring the Edge - Raghava K K
Raghava KK first exhibited at Ashvita’s in 2003, at a time when the gallery was still discovering its contemporary identity. He
was among the earliest of a new generation of artists we worked with, one who stood out immediately for his fearless
approach to figuration, his brilliance with color, and his intuitive understanding of human emotion. Over the last two
decades, from 2003 to around 2013, we had the privilege of growing alongside Raghava, witnessing the evolution of an
artist whose practice is as spontaneous as it is deeply considered.
Today, after more than twenty years, we are delighted to represent Raghava as part of Ashvita’s program once again. In
many ways, this exhibition, Figuring the Edge, is both a continuation and a renewal. It brings full circle an artistic
relationship built on trust, dialogue, and shared belief in the transformative power of painting.
Raghava has always been, and continues to be, a genius of gesture, color, and form. His works are born out of his
conversations with his own mind, with the people closest to him, and with the wider world. Every painting is an extension of
his persona: emotional, curious, restless, and alive. To me, as both curator and art dealer, Raghava’s art has always mirrored
his life, his constant reinvention, his courage to explore, and his relentless pursuit of ideas.
This exhibition brings together one of Raghava’s distinct yet connected bodies of work, The Edge Series. In these works,
Raghava returns to the tactile and sensorial pleasures of painting. The works are luscious, layered, and materially rich,
with paint applied in thick, almost edible dollops that carry the weight of emotion and thought. They break conventions of
surface and form and expand what painting can mean today.
Raghava’s art transcends geography. It carries the vibrancy of Indian color sensibilities but speaks a global visual language.
His paintings are loud yet contemplative, raw yet resolved, and serve as an invitation to experience the edge between chaos
and beauty.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
The edges — another powerful metaphor of bodily contact between different realities — of the canvas were the principal compositional element (this also incidentally means these paintings are impossible to photograph). Fluctuations between figure and ground and between the figurative and the abstract were important ‘edges’, resistances to easy readability.
Heightened impasto, use of differently produced textures, velocities, scars, marks at different physical scales, were important in creating a body that I wanted viewers to move towards and away and around.
Though one visual language, of peripheral figure and central ground, governs the series, each painting is a variation, an experiment. The source of the experiment was sometimes a reaction to a philosophy of the body (Agamben’s biopolitics), sometimes a formal or technical problem, sometimes the variety inherent in the metaphor of painting as body.
What this document highlights in a sense is its own limitation: these are meant to be unphotographable and so to invite you to meet them in person.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
EXHIBITION DETAILS
Dates
November 7, 2025 — December 31, 2024
Venue
Ashvita's, R. K. Salai
Curator
Ashvin E. Rajagopalan