Important Notice

“My present work is the result of two parallel enquiries. Firstly, it aimed at pure plastic order, form order. Secondly, it concerns the theme of Nature. Both have converged into a single point to become inseparable…”
- S H RAZA

While S H Raza often revisited themes close to his heart and primarily centred around nature, he was relentlessly inventive in his artistic pursuit. The mid-1970s and ’80s marked a pivotal shift away... “My present work is the result of two parallel enquiries. Firstly, it aimed at pure plastic order, form order. Secondly, it concerns the theme of Nature. Both have converged into a single point to become inseparable…”
- S H RAZA

While S H Raza often revisited themes close to his heart and primarily centred around nature, he was relentlessly inventive in his artistic pursuit. The mid-1970s and ’80s marked a pivotal shift away from the abstract expressionism that dominated his works of the ’50s and ’60s. His pursuit of a “pictorial logic of form” deepened and he integrated his expressionist techniques into a purely geometric abstraction. The present lot, which was painted in 1986, exemplifies this new phase during which “immense possibilities seemed to open, based on elementary geometric forms: the point, the circle, vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, the triangles, and the square… It opened up a whole new vocabulary which corresponded, in a sense, to my training in Paris in formalism.” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Ltd, 1997, p. 126)

This period of artistic rebirth was prompted by Raza’s visits to India during the ’70s and ’80s after having spent nearly four decades in France. As he travelled across his home state of Madhya Pradesh, he began questioning his own Indian identity and felt compelled to return to his roots. These visits “...re-sensitised his perceptiveness for a final supreme and universal viewing of nature, not as appearance, not as spectacle but as an integrated force of life and cosmic growth reflected in every fibre of a human being…Nature became to Raza something not to be observed or to be imagined but something to be experienced in the very act of putting paint on canvas.” (Rudolf von Leyden, “Metamorphosis” Raza, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1985)

Raza united this holistic perception of nature with a pure plastic ordering of form. Nature, and by extension the universe, was pared down to its most essential elements, many of which were inspired by tantric beliefs and the ancient Indian cosmology of the Vedas. In the present lot, horizontal and diagonal lines charge the canvas with energy and dissect it into triangles and quadrilaterals, which are further contained within concentric squares. According to the ancient Vedic scripture, the Upanishads, straight lines, diagonal lines, upright and inverted triangles are used to denote the rays of the sun, wind, fire, and water, respectively. The triangles are also commonly understood in Indian thought to represent purush and prakriti or the male and female energies that combine to beget life.

At the centre of the top of the canvas, almost like a third eye, is a bindu or black circle pulsating with energy. Once the black sun that loomed over his landscapes, the bindu became the central element of his work from the late 1970s onwards. The bindu in the present lot is inscribed within a downturned triangle mirrored by an upright one, alluding to its symbolism as the bija (seed) or source of life in the cosmos arising from the merging of the female and male energies. Raza rediscovered the bindu while visiting his hometown of Mandala, Madhya Pradesh, in 1978 where he was reminded of the black point that his primary school headmaster Nandlal Jhariya would draw on the white wall of the verandah for him to focus on to improve his concentration. He once remarked, “I have no apology for my repetition of the form of the bindu. With repetition you can gain energy and intensity-as is gained through the japmala, or the repetition of a word or a syllable until you achieve a state of elevated consciousness.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 128)

Raza also looked to India for his colour palette. Pure hues of red, white, blue, and black merge with shades of ochre, orange, umber, deep green, and midnight blue in the present lot, evoking the richness of the earth as well as the use of colour of the Mewar School of Indian miniature painting. Notes art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, “The juxtapositions of colours set off their own vibrations charging the canvas with an extra dimension.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Journeys With the Black Sun,” The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 164)

The act of painting was spiritual for Raza, a ritualistic process through which he could bring “to the arena of the visible that which had thus far remained invisible… Raza’s art raised the material world to the level of a cosmos, in which the earthly is elevated to be one with the etherly.” (Ashok Vajpeyi, “In the Hundredth Year,” Ashok Vajpeyi ed., Sayed Haider Raza, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing in association with The Raza Foundation, 2023, pp. 74 – 75)

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