At the Pundole’s auction house in Mumbai this past weekend, works by modern Indian masters Sayed Haider Raza, Francis Newton Souza, and Tyeb Mehta received record bids. While Raza’s “Gestation” sold for a record-breaking 51.75 crores (about $130 million), including commissions.
Sayed Haider Raza was one of the most well-known Indian artists of his time. Raza’s realistic paintings frequently featured landscapes and urban scenes in both France and India, while his revolutionary abstract works frequently used concentric circles and geometric patterns that evoked the Tantric beliefs of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Barbaria, India, gave birth to him on February 22, 1922, and he attended the Nagpur School of Art and the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay before heading to Paris to attend the École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts from 1950 to 1953. The Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in New Delhi all now hold works by Raza. The artist passed away on July 23, 2016, in New Delhi, India, after spending the majority of his life commuting between Paris and Gorbio, France.
Raza spent his life painting scenic scenes. In his works, you won’t find any depictions of people. He was never interested in telling stories about people or focusing on anecdotes. His interest in the natural world began and persisted with that activity. Beginning in the 1940s with depictions of rivers, forests, and waterfalls, his later works began to reflect the internal experiences of the artist, such as Summer, La Mer, and La Forge (1971 and 1974). Raza was invited to teach at Berkeley, California’s campus in 1962. The trip was not only energising but also had a profound effect on his perspective. The works of Sam Francis and Mark Rothko “came as a revelation” to him, and he found that he had affinities with the work and concepts of Hans Hofmann after moving to California. The effects of their efforts were far-reaching and far-reaching. They gave credence to his own conceptions. His work progressed beyond documenting aware reality to ‘abstracting the essence’ of nature.
Raza’s conception of the Gestation dates back to 1989, making this the most creatively productive decade of his life. The symbolism of the Bindu, the circle, is one of fullness or completion. As the worldwide sign of holy geography, it is employed here in the form of a circle within a square or mandala. When depicted in paintings like Ma (1981), the Bindu may come to represent India to Raza because it was his birthplace.
According to Raza’s account, his vision reached full maturity by 1989, when he published Gestation. The dark, packed circle occupies the centre of the canvas, hemmed in by a square on all sides. This simple geometric shape possesses all the charisma of an icon, drawing in the onlooker with its magnetic allure.
An additional square complements this image by extending to touch all four edges of the picture frame in a diagonal pattern. This causes a sensation of the circle’s core emblem growing larger throughout Gestation. All across the painting, diagonal and horizontal lines are moving, giving the piece a feeling of ferocious forward motion. This painting is 69 inches on each side and features almost forty tiny triangles. Most of the triangles are rendered in a deep black. Still, occasionally, one or two appear in the corners in fiery red or orange, pointing upwards or downwards and imparting their own unique vibrations to the otherwise restless artwork.
Life and vitality surge persistently throughout Gestation. It is conceived by combining the circle, square, diagonals, and triangles, all part of Raza’s lexicon. Its intricate web of geometric shapes sets it apart from other paintings of the same decade and the 1990s. During our conversations, Raza admitted that his views had shifted.
Image Courtesy: The Raza Foundation, New Delhi
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