Important Notice

"Away from India, I am constantly concerned with all that is happening at home. I am keen to reach the sources that have nourished me as a child, the ideals and concepts that have grown in my mind during the years, with greater awareness and meaning." - S H RAZA

By 1970, Raza's gestural style had become more fluid as compared to works created in the previous decade, underscored by a deeper, more contrasting palette. Influenced... "Away from India, I am constantly concerned with all that is happening at home. I am keen to reach the sources that have nourished me as a child, the ideals and concepts that have grown in my mind during the years, with greater awareness and meaning." - S H RAZA

By 1970, Raza's gestural style had become more fluid as compared to works created in the previous decade, underscored by a deeper, more contrasting palette. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionism of American artists - whose work he came across while teaching in Berkeley in 1962, as well as in Paris - Raza sought more to communicate emotions rather than images through his canvases. As the artist explained, "Thereafter visual reality, the aim to construct a 'tangible' world receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people." (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, "The Seed and the Fruit: Metaphors in Raza's Painting," S H Raza, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2005, p. 6) His paintings from the late 1960s gave way to a transfigured nature, where Raza - a master colourist - used light, shadow, and blazing colour to portray the world of his childhood.

The role of memory and his early experiences in India now began to increasingly manifest in his work, which was poised between his past and present. "From the 1960s and early 70s, when he was nearing fifty, Raza's works are impregnated with a sense of double identity... His gestural treatment inducts the layering of raw emotions, expressed through colours and through images which seem ephemeral - as fleeting emanations of forms resurrected from the past. Memory plays a strange and fascinating role, in that it feeds on images of the past and intensifies the experience for us - all the more so if we are separated by time and place." (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza's Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Limited, 1997, pp. 87-88)

The colours seen in the present lot evoke the darkness of night and the dense forests of Raza's hometown in Madhya Pradesh, juxtaposed with brighter tones signifying colour and life. The artist perhaps sought to highlight the co- existence of these two aspects, and has said that "Daybreak brought back a sentiment of security and well-being. On market day, under the radiant sun, the village was a fairyland of colours. And then, the night again. Even today I find that these two aspects of my life dominate me and are an integral part of my paintings." (Artist quoted in Jacques Lassaigne, Raza Anthology 1980-90, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1991) Black held immense potential for Raza, being the colour from which all other colours emerge.

This abstract preoccupation with his Indian origins opened the gates to a whole new world of inspiration for Raza, and structure, ge ometry and cosmological symbolism - including the concept of the bindu - would become critical elements of his later work. As Rudolf von Leyden predicted, "I believe that he is being drawn to irresistibly towards a new phase in which abstraction will be complete although I doubt that that will be the last and final evolution of his art. His powers are deep and large and capable of many mutations. Raza himself insists that mere abstractionism has no meaning for him. Nature must, and will, so he says, always be a primary part of his painting. It must enter into his images visibly, and with a purpose..." (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 20) Though written in 1959, these words resonated throughout Raza's career, which, in its many evolving phases, ultimately kept returning to nature as its core.

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