Important Notice

From his days as a member of the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay in the late 1940s, S.H. Raza's artistic career has centred on the pursuit of 'significant form' - a term coined by the renowned British critic Clive Bell to describe that perfect combination of line, colour and shape which leads, via emotion, to a "world of aesthetic ecstasy" (Clive Bell, "Art and Significant Form", Art, 1913).

Even after moving to France and... From his days as a member of the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay in the late 1940s, S.H. Raza's artistic career has centred on the pursuit of 'significant form' - a term coined by the renowned British critic Clive Bell to describe that perfect combination of line, colour and shape which leads, via emotion, to a "world of aesthetic ecstasy" (Clive Bell, "Art and Significant Form", Art, 1913).

Even after moving to France and several years of practice, during which he encountered and drew from artistic movements as diverse as Post Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, however, Raza did not feel that this quest was complete. According to him, something elemental, a core aesthetic that moved both creator and viewer, was still missing in his work. It was only during his travels in India during the 1980s, almost forty years after he began to paint, that the artist chanced upon the path that would eventually lead him to 'significant form'.

Though he had always been a painter of nature, these trips "...re-sensitised 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). Raza frequently refers to this period as a rebirth, claiming that his discovery of significant form helped him to finally emerge from the artistic womb he was encased in for the last several decades.

Uniting this new, holistic experience of nature with a pure, plastic ordering of form, the artist began to eliminate all that was superfluous in his images, and develop a new and highly concentrated symbolic idiom. Through this symbology, nature and its processes were pared down to their most essential elements, many of which were inspired by tantric beliefs and the ancient Indian cosmology of the Vedas. As the artist noted, "In terms of painting, immense possibilities seemed to open, based on elementary geometric forms: the point, the circle, vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, the triangles and the square" (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza's Vision, Media Transasia Ltd, New Delhi, 1997, p. 126).

At the heart of this universe was the bindu or black dot, symbolizing the source and end of all life in the cosmos: "…the point, the bindu, symbolises the seed, bearing the potential of all life, in a sense. It is also a visible form containing all the essential requisites of line, tone, colour, texture and space. The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfilment" (Ibid., p. 134).

In the present lot, a 1985 canvas titled 'Earth', the loose gestural brushwork of Raza's abstract expressionism gives way to a more controlled approach to abstract forms and spaces. An intersecting network of bold horizontal and diagonal lines and planes form the triangular symbols of purush and prakriti, or the male and female energies that combine to beget life, and at the very center of this heaving, expanding universe is the black bindu from which it seems to radiate.

At the same time that this network of shapes and lines emerged in Raza's work, his vivid palette also transformed to take on the earthy tones of the Indian landscape that inspired this transformation. Here, Raza uses colour, particularly shades of ochre, umber, sienna, red and brown, to represent the searing heat and passion of Central India, where he was born and raised. "The dazzling intersections and cross sections that create triangles revolving around a floating bindu for unparalleled geometrical structures. The juxtapositions of colours set off their own vibrations charging the canvas with an extra dimension" (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 164).

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