Sayed Haider Raza

Acrylic on board

Acquired directly from the artist's residence in Gorbio, France circa 1981-1982

There are a few scattered minor abrasions and minor paint losses particularly in green pigment around the edges. This painting is in overall good condition, as viewed.
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These vivid paintings by Sayed Haider Raza - Untitled (La Terre), lot 57 and Untitled –Green, lot 58, combine his influences from both France and India to produce an inimitable landscape with blazing colors that pulsate across the canvas depicting the rhythms of nature. Created in the years when Raza was moving towards total abstraction, these paintings belong to a celebrated series of colour-saturated works, which rank among the finest achievements of his extraordinary career. Executed in the early 1980s, they reveal Raza’s gestural brushstrokes, an element that later disappeared from his work into a more rigid and formal geometry.

While Raza’s style and aesthetic sensibilities evolved over the years, geometry and nature were always his main preoccupations. Explicitly unapologetic about the recurrences, Raza has remarked, “with repetition you can gain energy and intensity - as is gained through the japmala, or the repetition of a word or a syllable until you achieve a state of elevated consciousness.” (G. Sen, Bindu, Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, Media Transasia, New Delhi, 1997, p. 128) These two semi-abstracted landscapes (lots 57 and 58) have been re-created in many different ways over the course of several decades.

In these works of the early 1980s, he uses various hues to create a new type of landscape, one that captures not just the disposition of a place but also its cosmological reality. This gestural expressionism can be accredited to a trip to Berkeley, California where Raza came into contact with Abstract Expressionism and its proponents Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Raza responded masterfully to de Kooning’s spirited interaction of shapes as one of area of colour counterbalanced against another and the candor and immediacy of paint replaced his cautious constructions of the past.

Raza also used specific shapes and colours to present different aspects of the natural world, making his works fundamentally symbolic. Sen explains, “The five Elements, the pancha bhutas (space, air, fire, water and earth), are considered in Indian thought to constitute the “raw material” for everything in this universe. Raza introduces them into his paintings, as he explicitly mentions, through five bold colors of black, white, red, yellow and blue.” (ibid., p. 25)  This time also marked a change in medium from oil to acrylic. Acrylic lent itself to the language of gesture, a fluidity which Raza exploited to its maximum potential. Liberated by this choice of medium, Raza painted dynamic compositions that engulf the viewer.

Whether one sees the colours of Indian miniatures or the style of Abstract expressionism in these works, they are amongst the strongest examples of his paintings from this period.