Important Notice

S H Raza evokes the emotive qualities of the landscape of northern India in this painting from 1978. The gestural brushwork carries forward Raza's unrestrained, expressionist technique of the preceding decade. The composition and earthy colours bear a raw energy which explores the emotive content of colour. Paintings such as this indicate his shift towards the intangible, metaphysical concepts of philosophy that were to be his focus in later... S H Raza evokes the emotive qualities of the landscape of northern India in this painting from 1978. The gestural brushwork carries forward Raza's unrestrained, expressionist technique of the preceding decade. The composition and earthy colours bear a raw energy which explores the emotive content of colour. Paintings such as this indicate his shift towards the intangible, metaphysical concepts of philosophy that were to be his focus in later years.

Through the 1970s, Raza was intent on returning to his roots. After studying colour, structure and composition in France in the 1950s, and then creating spontaneous, non-representational landscapes in the 1960s, Raza felt his art to be incomplete without reference to his country. In his own words, "It was not easy to acquire some measure of success and have a standing in France and Europe. My ambition was greater and I thought that I had to go back to my sources... to study more seriously the fundamental principles that underlie the Indian arts." (S H Raza, Ashok Vajpeyi, Passion: Life and Art of Raza, New Delhi: Rajkamal Books, 2005, p. 60) He made frequent trips through India from 1975, and revisited Babaria and Kakaiya in Madhya Pradesh, where he had spent his childhood.

On these visits to India, Raza delved into Indian poetry, music, dance, literature, philosophy and painting. He studied human expression and mood in miniature paintings. "We know very well that in a painting this investing of climate, a mood is an Indian concept. I constantly gave importance to this desire to paint a mood of the morning or the day, or of an evening like in the ragas and raginis, even if the whole perception was in colour, and in the actual work." (Raza and Vajpeyi, p. 60) He painted fluid landscapes in the 1970s, free from the restrictions of his previous classical, Western training. The present lot captures the intangible qualities of emotion and mood which Raza associated with Indian life and art.

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