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Bent Pin (2023) is a meditation on brokenness as potential. Part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this 36 x 48 inch mixed media painting on wood reclaims disruption as a generative force. The “bent pin” in the title is both literal and metaphorical — a small object transformed by pressure, now carrying its own quiet dignity.

Built on a raw wood panel, the piece is constructed with painted layers, embedded materials, and scraped surfaces. The color palette leans toward muted metals — oxidized copper, brushed steel, bruised plum — punctuated by a single curving gesture in bone white. The texture is tactile, even industrial.

This work emerged during a moment of internal friction — when I was questioning the usefulness of perfection. Bent Pin became a metaphor for resilience, for the elegance in something skewed yet still functioning.

The painting shares a quiet kinship with the work of Eva Hesse, whose fragile materials and malformed structures speak of vulnerability as a site of power. Like Hesse, I believe the irregular can be beautiful — even more honest than what’s pristine.

Bent Pin doesn’t shout. It endures. It holds the memory of resistance, of pressure endured without collapse. There’s tension in the form — a line pulled taut, a surface dented but deliberate.

As part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this painting is a small monument to survival. It says: even a bent pin can hold things together.

Ritu Raj | Contemporary Abstract Painter | Phoenix

Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona, working mostly at scale — canvases of five to eight feet. His practice runs in two bodies: Abstract Inquiry, in oil and acrylic, and Organic Movement, which replaces the brush with thread, using gravity and viscosity as compositional instruments. More than 260 works, collected across the US, Europe and Asia. He is the author of the forthcoming The Shape of Seeing and The Unalgorithmic Self.

https://www.rituart.com/
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