An Exploration of Organic Abstraction, Primal Forces, and Material Innovation

Ritu Raj’s Organic Movement Collection explores cosmic forces, chaos, and organic abstraction through innovative twine painting on wet oil canvas.

Emerging from the Shadow, 5ft x 4ft, Organic Movement, 2024

The Organic Movement Collection by Ritu Raj is a groundbreaking series that bridges the language of gestural abstraction with the primal forces of organic matter and cosmic energies. Created between 2024 and 2025, the collection consists of monumental oil on canvas works, each measuring 60 x 60 inches. Through these canvases, Raj navigates the fertile tension between chaos and order, darkness and illumination, and the synthetic and the organic.

What distinguishes this collection technically is Raj’s innovative use of twine painting over wet oil canvases, a method that blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture. This approach involves dragging and imprinting oil-drenched twine across richly layered wet oil surfaces, creating intricate, spontaneous patterns that resemble veins, roots, and mycelial networks. The method is physically immersive and unpredictable, ensuring that each mark is a unique imprint of chance, gesture, and material interaction.

This technique echoes the materiality seen in the works of Contemporary artists like Mark Bradford, who incorporates rope, paper, and found materials into layered abstractions, and Rashid Johnson, whose use of organic matter such as shea butter and black soap creates sensorial, living surfaces. However, Raj’s approach remains distinct in its focus on the ephemeral interaction between the synthetic twine and the organic chaos of wet oil paint, allowing the canvas to become both a battlefield and a nursery for new forms of abstraction.

Across the collection, paintings such as Abstraction of Prime, Blazing Sun, and Chaos and Order embrace the cosmos, the cellular, and the psychological. The bold, sweeping gestures are countered by the delicate intricacies left behind by the dragging of twine—forming natural lattices, fractures, and circulatory systems. This method not only generates compelling visuals but also deepens the metaphorical language of the collection, suggesting life’s interconnectedness, the messiness of creation, and the entropic beauty of decay.

Ritu Raj’s Organic Movement Collection stands at the intersection of abstraction, material experimentation, and environmental philosophy. It celebrates the uncontrollable vitality of nature while critiquing the sterility of overly rigid modernist ideals. Raj’s incorporation of twine painting on wet oil is not just an aesthetic choice but a philosophical gesture—a surrender to the forces of nature, entropy, and chance.

These works speak to the legacy of Joan Mitchell, Kazuo Shiraga, Lee Krasner, Anselm Kiefer, and Pierre Soulages, yet push the conversation further into a space where abstraction is porous, tactile, and deeply rooted in the physical processes of the world.