Books by Ritu Raj
One asks how abstraction arrives. The other asks what no algorithm can reach. Both come from the studio, from the same question a painter asks every morning in front of a blank canvas: what is actually happening when a person sees?
Essays · September 2026
The Genesis of Abstraction
Twenty short essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, and on what happens between a person and an abstract canvas. Part memoir, part meditation, for anyone who has felt something before a painting and could not find the words.
ISBN 978-1-969063-71-8 (paperback) · 978-1-969063-72-5 (hardcover)
About the book →
Philosophy · September 2026
Art, AI, and the Future of Human Thinking
Thirty chapters on the body, emotion, memory, imagination, identity, love, ethics and art: the part of a life that has an inside. Not a book against AI. A book about remembering ourselves, written openly in conversation with one.
ISBN 979-8-90447-029-6 (paperback) · 979-8-90447-030-2 (hardcover)
About the book →The Shape of Seeing asks
What happens between a person and a painting that cannot be put into words?
The Unalgorithmic Self asks
What in a person cannot be extracted, predicted or reproduced?
Read together, they make one argument from two sides: that the most human thing we do is pay attention, and that attention is the one thing no system can do on our behalf.
About the author
Ritu Raj is an American painter, author and entrepreneur working from RituStudio in Phoenix, Arizona. His signature technique, Organic Movement, sets the brush aside and works the paint with thread, leaving a striated relief that changes as you move past it.
Born in New Delhi, he grew up among India’s modernists, Souza, Husain, Raza and Swaminathan, through his father K.B. Goel, one of India’s preeminent art critics. His mother, a professor of English literature, taught him to listen to the silence between words. One gave him form; the other, meaning.
Mathematics and computer science became another grammar for the same question, and three decades of building companies tested it at scale: he founded Avasta and Wag Hotels and helped build SideCar and Diamond Foundry. The painting, the writing, and ArtGraph, his language system for encountering abstract art, are one inquiry held in different materials.
The two books are where that inquiry is written down.
The artist, shows and exhibitionsThe paintingsArtGraphRitu Raj on Amazon
Press, podcasts and events
For interviews, podcasts, book talks, review copies and studio visits. Bio, photographs, covers and the fact sheet are in the press kit.
Booksellers and libraries: both books are available through Ingram at standard trade terms.
Art that listens.