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Lot 83

 

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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.

Titled Prakriti or Nature, the present lot reflects the Raza’s lifelong commitment to... 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.

Titled Prakriti or Nature, the present lot reflects the Raza’s lifelong commitment to the colours, rhythms and cycles of the natural world. Evolving from his initial academic landscapes to more abstract 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 combination of upright and inverted triangles and the circle, or bindu, to symbolize a meeting of primal energies in the left panel, and a tree in the right one. Through these images, the artist alludes to the perpetual natural cycle of fertilization, germination, growth, reproduction and death, with the compact central bindu symbolic of potential energy and the source and end of all life.

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