Important Notice

A member of the Bombay Progressives and one of India's foremost Modernists, Syed Haider Raza belonged to a generation of artists who sought to represent a new India through a modern idiom. This quest also included some of his contemporaries, such as Akbar Padamsee, Ram Kumar, Sakti Burman, and Jehangir Sabavala, who travelled to Paris-the Mecca for fine arts at the time- in the late 1940s and 1950s, to further their understanding of form, colour... A member of the Bombay Progressives and one of India's foremost Modernists, Syed Haider Raza belonged to a generation of artists who sought to represent a new India through a modern idiom. This quest also included some of his contemporaries, such as Akbar Padamsee, Ram Kumar, Sakti Burman, and Jehangir Sabavala, who travelled to Paris-the Mecca for fine arts at the time- in the late 1940s and 1950s, to further their understanding of form, colour and technique. They imbibed their learnings to explore formal and thematic concerns, while remaining in touch with their roots.

Raza's initial years were spent studying Cezanne and Matisse to understand how to construct landscapes. His landscapes through the 1950s were, therefore, carefully structured renderings of the French countryside. From these structured landscapes, he transitioned to gestural abstracts after encountering Rothko and Hoffman's works while at the University of Berkeley, California. His preoccupation with landscapes endured, and continued through the 1970s. However, by this time, Raza was gripped by a yearning to return to India. One could see a confluence of his preceding styles: while some of the spontaneity of the brushstrokes was retained, the colours were structured and balanced. This also owed to Raza's assimilation of Indian painting traditions, such as the Rajput, Jain and Mewar Schools, Hindu philosophy, and the tradition of rasas or emotions. The structure eventually paved way for concrete, geometric shapes, and the bindu, considered in Hinduism as the origins of life and energy, dominated a large part of his oeuvre.

By the 1980s, Raza's works began featuring concrete geometric symbols to represent aspects of Hindu philosophy, such as Tantra and the mandalas, both representative of cosmology. A decade prior, these symbols were still nebulous and only gradually taking shape. Additionally, he represented the five basic elements - earth, fire, water, sky, and ether - through five corresponding colours. All these elements come into play in the present lot to represent "Nari", or Shakti: the female force that acts as a balance to the male force.

The force is represented as a pervading calmness through a use of soothing hues and precise patterns. Raza uses a palette of cool colours to represent the two energies intertwining and fusing, giving birth to life. He uses the classic Tantric symbology of upright and inverted triangles, along with coiling serpents and concentric circles. The circles and serpentine forms in the centre panel spring from the concept of the kundalini-the coiled serpent believed to be dormant at the base of the spine, from which energy springs forth. The repetitive patterns, along with the colours, resemble the japmala, or the act of repeating certain words to achieve a state of inner peace, which Raza mentions in a comment. The artist further alludes to the duality of male and female using the black bindu at the centre, throbbing with the life potential it contains. At the base is an inscription in Sanskrit-perhaps a nod to the tradition of Mewar folios with inscriptions from the rasikapriya verse- that venerates the two balancing forces, reinforcing the meditative value of the painting.

Taking geometrical abstraction to unprecedented levels, every colour and shape in Raza's work bears significant meaning, relating to an element of nature or to part of the universal cycle of life and death. "Raza's work assumes a distinctly different meaning from the paintings of colour field vision and from hard-edged abstraction. In his canvases, geometrical forms are used to map the universe. Here, the vocabulary of pure plastic form acquires an integral purpose: to relate the shape and rhythm of these forms to Nature" (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza's Vision, Media Transasia Ltd, New Delhi, 1997, pg. 118).

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