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Lot 80

 

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The only member of the Progressive Artists’ Group not to turn to the figure in the quest to develop a new, Indian aesthetic, S.H. Raza found his inspiration in his environs. Over the last six decades, the artist has continued to engage with the natural world through his work, using it as a platform to approach broader philosophical questions. As Friedhelm Mennekes notes, “Nature, for this artist, is something eternally alive. It is embedded in... The only member of the Progressive Artists’ Group not to turn to the figure in the quest to develop a new, Indian aesthetic, S.H. Raza found his inspiration in his environs. Over the last six decades, the artist has continued to engage with the natural world through his work, using it as a platform to approach broader philosophical questions. As Friedhelm Mennekes notes, “Nature, for this artist, is something eternally alive. It is embedded in the cosmos as a whole and actually does not refer to the world we live in today, but is open to evolutionary questions such as the ‘where from’ and ‘where to’. What we see reminds us of many regions and worlds, which exist in the mind and imagination as well as in reality, and, therefore must be recognised. Raza believes that nature moves itself rather than being moved by the beholder” (“Soft Polarity”, in S. H. Raza – Paintings from 1966 to 2003, The Fine Art Resource Berlin exhibition catalogue, 2003, unpaginated).

Titled Prakriti or Nature, the present lot reflects the artist’s lifelong commitment to the colours, rhythms and cycles of the natural world. Evolving from his initial academic landscapes to expressionist depictions of the moods they inspired in him, and finally to a non-objective mapping of the Universe and its forces, this commitment runs parallel to Raza’s unremitting search for significant form.

The artist’s recent meditations on geometric forms revert to simple means to attain the purest or most original form of Nature. In the present lot, Raza deploys the inverted triangle and the circle, or bindu, to symbolize the tree, and through it, allude to the perpetual natural cycle of fertilization, germination, growth, reproduction and death. Just as the upturned triangle is also symbolic of female sexuality and reproduction, the bindu can be read as bija or a seed, bearing the potential of new life in its simple and compact form.

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