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Lot 10

 

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Raza's visits to India in the 1960s and 70s "…re-sensitized 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's visits to India in the 1960s and 70s "…re-sensitized 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, Chemould Publications and Arts, Mumbai, 1985, not paginated).

Inspired by Jain and Rajasthani miniatures from the seventeenth century, the artist adopted a primary palette of red, green, blue and yellow, in addition to black and white, to convey his visions of nature and its core elements - earth, water, fire, sky and space. Additionally, Raza's gestural abstract expressionism, which he had turned to in the early 1962 following a summer spent teaching at the University of California in Berkeley, found itself subject to the new geometric parameters on the painted surface, foreshadowing the purer form of abstraction that the artist turned to in the 1980s. Although some of the loose brushwork remained, it was circumscribed within a definite frame composed of solid, horizontal and vertical bands of colour.

Together, these elements signalled a significant transformation in Raza's oeuvre. Moving away from the expression of the artist's feelings and personal experience of a place, Raza's artistic vocabulary shifted to express the system in which time and space were ordered in the universe. Through a geometric idiom of lines and shapes, the artist began to reference not just the mood of a scene, but its cosmological implications as well. The present lot, an early representative of this transformation, is additionally inscribed with a Devnagari phrase. Loosely translating as 'Let the path be unknown, let the soul be alone", this couplet underlines Raza's almost ascetic dedication to the development of his artistic vocabulary and the quest for 'significant form'.

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