Photograph by Don Freeman
BIO/ARTIST STATEMENT
BIO
Raghubir Kintisch (b. 1955, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of spiritual and creative practices. Their richly textured oil paintings on paper emerge from collage and pattern-based sketches, reflecting themes of alternative universes, nature, and the inner mind. Kintisch holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Social Practice from Otis College of Art and Design.
Kintisch exhibited at MoMA (2017–2018 Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983), La Foret Museum (Tokyo), Launch Gallery, LAXART, Keystone Art Gallery, Robert Berman Gallery, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Armory Center for the Arts, Winslow Garage, Kleinert-James Gallery (Woodstock, NY), Proxy Gallery, MutMuz Gallery, Angels Gate Cultural Center, and Tryst Art Fair (Torrance), among others. A Byrdcliffe Artist-in-Residence for four consecutive years from 2022–2025, Kintisch received Pollock-Krasner Foundation funding in 2023 and was awarded a Silver Sun Foundation Residency in 2021. Recent works include diptychs, triptychs, mixed-media collage, and India ink tonal paintings, featuring vibrant color, texture, and patterning. Kintisch lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Painting for me is both a visual and spiritual practice. I wanted to see what would happen if I stayed with an image long enough for it to change. Following that impulse, my paintings begin with observed imagery, often botanical forms, but they are not attempts to represent the visible world. Through repeated cycles of painting, photographing, fragmenting, recombining, and painting again, the image gradually departs from its source, entering a threshold between recognition and abstraction where memory, sensation, and imagination coexist.
The paintings are less concerned with arriving at a fixed image than with creating conditions in which seeing itself becomes the subject. Rather than pursuing a predetermined composition, I allow each painting to evolve through intuition, repetition, and material transformation. Through this iterative process, abstraction becomes a way of encountering aspects of experience that lie beyond immediate perception.
My work is informed by mythology, sacred ritual, the esoteric, and the subtle transformations of the natural world. I am drawn to moments when coincidence feels meaningful and the ordinary seems to reveal something mysterious. Music is an essential part of my studio practice, often shaping my experience of color, rhythm, and pattern through synesthetic association.