<click here to see Raghava's work>
Bangalore's most celebrated young artist, Raghava, delivers an unparalleled show to Artana this March. The painter, 25 years of age, is nominated by India Today magazine as a "Top 50 Young Achiever" candidate.Many art experts and critics believe Raghava's work, having shown in 13 countries world-wide, to be a guaranteed future blue-chip art investment. Raghava's dynamic 2006 show consists of large dreamlike watercolors on stretched canvas, painted with his hands.
To date this exciting talent's work has been auctioned by the likes of the Indo American Arts Council & the Queens Museum of Art, while media coverage includes MTV, India Today, & Times of India, and corporate collectors include Caterpillar, GE India, The Hindu, & Intel.
Kindly contact the gallery for a complete overview of Raghava’s unmatched list of achievements.
PERSONAL STATEMENT
For me Art is not a representation of Reality. It is creation. It is hubris.
When I compose a canvas (and I mean compose in the sense using the elements of
vision to create an aesthetic artifact, much like a
musician would use the elements of sound to create a fugue) I consciously
manipulate a few chosen visual elements and these are in effect my
subjects. Most important amongst these
are 1) color, and here the notion of intensity and hue are incorporated, 2)
texture and pattern, these two elements being used as one compositional
principle and 3) scale, by which I mean not merely the size of the canvas
but also the relative sizes of objects in it. I least consciously
manipulate as a variational principle what is commonly thought of as
subject—the human face and figure. When I paint a human figure, the only
interest it has for me as a human figure is the infinitude of expressive
spatialities that inhere in it. Art for
me is creation under constraint, where the notion of economy of means is
critical. And hence my experiments with single colors, with so-called
'monochrome' works.
My training comes from my travel. From the varied patterns of human gestures I see in the worlds I visit. From the shawl a a woman from Errachidia wears to the style of the beard of an old homeless man in Paris. My training also ultimately comes from the artists whose work I love. My aesthetic confrontation with these artists inspires me to forge my own worldview.
—Raghava