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Lot 52

 

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“My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light.” - S H RAZA

S H Raza’s art moved away from the Cubist forms and carefully constructed compositions of his Paris years to a more fluid and gestural form of abstraction in the 1970s. Inspired both by the works of American Abstract Expressionist artists such as Mark Rothko and Sam Francis, as... “My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light.” - S H RAZA

S H Raza’s art moved away from the Cubist forms and carefully constructed compositions of his Paris years to a more fluid and gestural form of abstraction in the 1970s. Inspired both by the works of American Abstract Expressionist artists such as Mark Rothko and Sam Francis, as well as the recollections of his homeland India, Raza developed a unique aesthetic language that presented a more personalised form of abstract expressionism – one that inevitably drew him closer to his roots.

Raza’s paintings during this period were heavily influenced by his memories of and trips to India. In 1978, Raza was invited by the Madhya Pradesh government to present an exhibition of his works - an event that was a huge success and once again placed the artist firmly within the modern Indian art landscape. According to art critic Rudy von Leyden, Raza’s visits “resensitized 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 elementary particle and 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. Painting acts itself out as a natural force, struggling in darkness, breaking into light, shivering in cold, burning in heat, trying to find form and yet dissolving into chaos... the work of art emerges as an entity of vibrating power, metamorphosis incarnate, unchangeable and ever changing like the forces of nature reflected in the human mind.” (Rudolf von Leyden, “Metamorphosis,” Raza, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1985)

By the late 1970s, Raza’s abstract expressionism found itself subjected to new geometric parameters on the painted surface. He developed a style that emphasised on emotion rather than representation – a principle that was also supported by his shift from oil to the more versatile acrylic medium. Through a geometric vocabulary of lines and shapes, which he further developed and refined in the following decade, Raza’s artworks eventually transitioned from an expression of his feelings, memories or personal experience to the mapping out of his spiritual and metaphysical meditations on nature and life.

Painted in 1979, the present lot belongs to an important period in Raza’s stylistic evolution when he began introducing geometry and iconography to his practice. Although the loose brushwork of his early ‘70s works remained, it was now circumscribed within a definite frame composed of solid, horizontal and vertical lines of colour.

By using a predominantly dark palette, with notes of earthy yellow and green tones that are possibly reminiscent of the artist’s childhood memories spent in the dense forests of Madhya Pradesh, Raza continues to allude to his homeland and memories through the present lot. “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)

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