Meenal Raghava

Biography

Meenal Raghava is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the fluid construction of identity within migratory and transnational experience. Using oils, acrylics, concrete, and epoxy, she creates surfaces where memory and material intersect, revealing how belonging is continually renegotiated across shifting cultural terrains.

Born in New Delhi, Raghava’s practice emerges from the tension between displacement and the desire for rootedness. Her visual language draws on the contemplative force of color field painting, the perceptual investigations of Impressionism, and the intricate aesthetics of Indian miniature and tribal traditions. Through textured industrial materials and chromatic abstraction, she explores the psychic architectures shaped by ongoing self-redefinition.

Central to her work is the idea of “becoming” — transformation as a lived condition rather than a destination. Her compositions operate as contemplative sites that invite viewers to reflect on how identity is formed not only through geography and history but through the internal migrations of memory, longing, and imagination.

Raghava has exhibited at The Other Art Fair, Atlantic Gallery, Art Gotham, and Saint Marks Gallery, and has been featured in Canvas Rebel Magazine, the Counterculture Podcast, and the Arts x Artists platform. She engages an international audience of more than 70,000.

She lives and works in New York City.

Artist statement

Moving between New Delhi and New York, I understand identity not as inheritance but as continual negotiation — a shifting terrain shaped by memory, distance, and the labor of belonging. My work asks: How does one become at home in motion, and what visual language can hold the complexities of that becoming?

My paintings function as speculative architectures, exploring the way memory settles in the body, cultural lineages persist or fracture, and how place is endlessly re-authored through presence and absence. Using oils, acrylics, concrete, and epoxy, I construct surfaces where industrial weight meets chromatic fluidity, mirroring the internal structures of identity. Color operates as both emotional force and historical trace.

Influenced by color field painting alongside Indian miniature and tribal traditions, ultimately my practice exists in thresholds—between here and there, past and present—seeking not resolution, but perhaps understanding and transformation.