Important Notice

Raghav Kaneria is an abstract sculptor who works largely with industrial materials. He manipulates industrial metal and other found objects to echo his rural early life in works like the Bull series (1959) and Jumping Calf (1978).

Kaneria was born in Gujarat in 1936 to an agrarian family which had a lasting impact on his practice. In 1955, he joined the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara,... Raghav Kaneria is an abstract sculptor who works largely with industrial materials. He manipulates industrial metal and other found objects to echo his rural early life in works like the Bull series (1959) and Jumping Calf (1978).

Kaneria was born in Gujarat in 1936 to an agrarian family which had a lasting impact on his practice. In 1955, he joined the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, where he studied sculpture under Sankho Chaudhuri. It was there that he gravitated towards working with scrap metal.

He was a member of the short-lived artist collective Group 1890, formed in 1962, which believed that, “Art is neither conformity to reality nor a flight from it, it is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold of passage into the world of freedom.” Kaneria was the sole sculptor to exhibit as part of the group at Rabindra Bhavan in 1963.

The artist studied at the Royal College of Art, where he worked with Bernard Meadows, from 1964 to 1968 on a Commonwealth scholarship. In 1967, he won a Sainsbury Scholarship. He taught at the Walthamstow School of Art, London in the 1960s before joining Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU as Reader. He commenced teaching at Hull College of Art on receiving the Foreign Visiting Artist Fellowship in 1972.

Raghav Kaneria was part of the Commonwealth Art Exhibition in 1962 and Bernard Meadows at the Royal College of Art, 1960–1980 in 1980, in addition to having his works exhibited at Fukuoka Art Museum in 1979; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 1980; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1982; Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai in 1983; Pushkin Museum, Moscow in 1987; and the Delhi Art Gallery in 2015 and 2016.

He has been awarded the Gold Medal from Bombay Arts Society and the Silver Medal from the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society in 1961, and a National Award by the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1963.

Read More
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site