The Shape of Seeing: The Genesis of Abstraction

Where does abstraction begin? Not on the canvas, but in the act of seeing.

In 2020, as the world went silent, painter Ritu Raj picked up a piece of string, dipped it in pigment and pulled it across a surface. That accident became a practice, and the practice became this book: short essays on silence, color, time, shadow, breath and attention, written alongside the paintings.

Perhaps abstraction is simply what happens when words run out.

Raised in New Delhi in a house of art and language, the son of the critic K.B. Goel and Dr. P.L. Goel, a professor of English literature, Raj writes as a working painter: from the studio, not about it. The Shape of Seeing is for anyone who has stood before a painting and felt something before they could say why.