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Lot 6

 

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Non-representative art, particularly in India, is often understood as a means of repudiating the worldly concerns of pleasure and pain, wealth and poverty. However, “Raza’s practice of symbolic abstraction has demonstrated that abstraction can also articulate an embracing of sringara, a joyous reaching-out experience. The abstractionist need not be a self-denying ascetic or a slave to the stimulations of the senses; rather, he can flourish... Non-representative art, particularly in India, is often understood as a means of repudiating the worldly concerns of pleasure and pain, wealth and poverty. However, “Raza’s practice of symbolic abstraction has demonstrated that abstraction can also articulate an embracing of sringara, a joyous reaching-out experience. The abstractionist need not be a self-denying ascetic or a slave to the stimulations of the senses; rather, he can flourish through a dynamic interplay between these positions, savouring the world as a coded invitation that rewards the deciphering self with an expansion of consciousness” (Ranjit Hoskote, Painting as Japa: Recent Works by S.H. Raza, Art Musings exhibition catalogue, 2004, unpaginated).

Prakriti, or the cosmic concept of nature that Raza’s art is committed to bringing to the viewer, comprises five basic elements: samira or ether, gagan or sky, pawak or fire, jala or water and kshiti or earth. Each of these rudimentary forces is represented by particular primary colors and geometric symbols in the artist’s unique non-representative idiom, and through their interplay, the artist seeks to commune with the universe.

In this set of three canvases, Raza meditates on nature, its elements and processes, and the continuous life-cycle they come together to maintain. While the second canvas focuses on the center of Raza’s worldview, the ubiquitous bindu which represents the beginning and end of all sentience, the first is composed of several triangles, upright and inverted, symbolizing the generative combination of male and female energy that gives rise to it. The third canvas is an earthy meditation on ankuran or germination, and the maturation of the bindu within the garbha or womb.

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