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Lot 75

 

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Non-representative art, particularly in India, is often understood as a means of repudiating worldly pleasure and pain. However, "Raza’s practice of symbolic abstraction has demonstrated that abstraction can also articulate an embracing of sringara, a joyous reaching-out experience. The abstractionist need not be a self-denying ascetic or a slave to the stimulations of the senses; rather, he can flourish through a dynamic interplay between these... Non-representative art, particularly in India, is often understood as a means of repudiating worldly pleasure and pain. However, "Raza’s practice of symbolic abstraction has demonstrated that abstraction can also articulate an embracing of sringara, a joyous reaching-out experience. The abstractionist need not be a self-denying ascetic or a slave to the stimulations of the senses; rather, he can flourish through a dynamic interplay between these positions, savouring the world as a coded invitation that rewards the deciphering self with an expansion of consciousness" (Ranjit Hoskote, Painting as Japa: Recent Works by S H Raza, Art Musings exhibition catalogue, 2004, unpaginated).

From the expressionistic application of paint that captured the mood of his landscapes in the 1950s and 60s, to the bold, primary palette of his later, geometric meditations on the nature of the universe, colour has always been central to the development of Raza’s artistic vocabulary and the ‘expansion of his consciousness’. In the present lot, Raza ascribes the colours he uses with symbolic meaning, carrying their import beyond the realm of the visual. He explains that in addition to constituting the colour spectrum of the visible world, the primary palette of white, red, blue, yellow and black also represents the fundamental elements of creation – earth, sky, air, water and fire.

This large canvas, titled Maha Bharata, translating literally as ‘great India’, is Raza’s homage to his motherland, a country whose citizenship he will never renounce, even though he has lived outside of it for more than fifty years. Rather than referencing the eponymous epic, this lot describes the integral role India, its lands, its histories and its philosophies have played in the development of the artist’s oeuvre.

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