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Lot 59

 

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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.

In the late 1970s, however, Raza’s gestural abstract expressionism found itself subject to new geometric parameters on the painted surface. Although the loose brushwork remained, it was now circumscribed within a definite frame composed of solid, horizontal and vertical bands of colour. These elements signaled a significant change in Raza’s oeuvre. Moving away from an 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 bright red frame that Raza has painted around the present lot, like ones he added to many other canvases from the same period, may also be interpreted as emphasizing “the artifice of the canvas” on which the true “passion and violence of the land” could never really be captured (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 155). Additionally, in its precisely constructed form, the frame foreshadows the artist’s next period of painting, where geometrical structures and cosmological symbolism become critical elements of his work.

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