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

My oil paintings on paper explore the intersection of mystical abstraction, ritual practice, and perceptual experience. I am drawn to the way a surface can hold both pattern and rupture, and convey flatness, three-dimensional space, and the mental terrain. My process is rooted in collage: I gather fragments drawn from observation, earlier paintings, photographs, memory, or historical reference, and bring them into relation through repetition, layering, and distortion. In doing so, I create works that suggest the visionary, the familiar, and places where plant life feels charged with presence.

I build textural, color-dense surfaces by exaggerating forms, reconfiguring lines, and layering pattern upon pattern. The result is a composition that resists stability and predictability even when rooted in bilateral symmetry. These images are immersive yet unsettled, echoing the rhythms of ritual and trance states. The process is akin to musical sampling: the image is never fixed but constantly shifting through iteration and recombination.

Many of my projects have centered on multi-panel formats, especially diptychs and triptychs, through which I explore how ritual, trance, and altered perception can be embedded in form. In recent work, these concerns have taken on an ecological dimension. I am increasingly attentive to cycles of growth and decay, to the fragility of plant life, and to the way natural forms mirror the abstract rhythms that have long been central to my practice. This shift has opened new possibilities for collaboration with archives, arboreta, and decorative arts collections, where research deepens the visual and conceptual language of the paintings.

Painting, for me, is not only a visual practice but a spiritual one. Ultimately, I see this work as an inquiry into how abstraction can serve as a form of mysticism: a way of accessing what lies beyond the visible and creating space for reflection and transformation.