Important Notice

The present lot was created during a period when Raza's work was undergoing a stylistic and emotional transformation. The role of memory and his early experiences in India now began to increasingly appear in his work. "From the 1960s and early 70s, when he was nearing fifty, Raza's works are impregnated with a sense of double identity... His gestural treatment inducts the layering of raw emotions, expressed through colours and through images... The present lot was created during a period when Raza's work was undergoing a stylistic and emotional transformation. The role of memory and his early experiences in India now began to increasingly appear in his work. "From the 1960s and early 70s, when he was nearing fifty, Raza's works are impregnated with a sense of double identity... His gestural treatment inducts the layering of raw emotions, expressed through colours and through images which seem ephemeral - as fleeting emanations of forms resurrected from the past. Memory plays a strange and fascinating role, in that it feeds on images of the past and intensifies the experience for us - all the more so if we are separated by time and place." (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza's Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Limited, 1997, pp. 87-88)

Consequently, the abstract, expressionistic style of the previous decade metamorphosed, retaining the fluid brushstrokes but comprising a certain structure of form and space. Raza would travel to India more frequently in this decade, ushering in a period of selfreflexivity and a deeper engagement with forms, colours and philosophies rooted in his home country. This shift "...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, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1985)

The present lot features a predominantly dark palette, with flashes of green and earth tones, possibly reminiscent of Raza's childhood memories spent in the dense forests of Madhya Pradesh, and the fear and fascination associated with them. "Nights in the forests were hallucinating... Daybreak brought back a sentiment of security and well-being... Even today I find that these two aspects of my life dominate me and are an integral part of my paintings. (Artist quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 197) The brushstrokes highlight the use of colour and texture as the primary driving forces in the work, emphasising emotion rather than representation. "Thereafter visual reality, the aim to construct a 'tangible' world receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people. (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, "The Seed and the Fruit: Metaphors in Raza's Painting," S H Raza, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2005, p. 6)

Raza recognised the importance of constants amid change. Perhaps it is for this reason that he revisited concepts and subjects that held an emotional significance that was likely to endure. According to Yashodhara Dalmia, "For Raza there is an awareness of the past which continuously exists in the present... We see that his colour cycles are matched by a conceptual stream which continuously archives deeper ravines. This restless craving for a renewal of means and methods is the essential aspect of the works of Raza." ("The Subliminal World of Raza," Vajpeyi, p. 197)

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