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Lot Essay
One of India's leading modern masters, Syed Haider Raza was a founding member of the revolutionary Bombay Progressive Artists' Group formed in the year of India's Independence in 1947. Raza left India for France arriving in October 1950 to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and recollects excitedly absorbing the thriving local scene. He was greatly influenced by the coloration and composition of the Post-Impressionists and of his early experiences in France.
In its persuasive delineation of a rich, animated landscape full of energy, vitality and detail--a very painterly world of life--rooted around the mystical and minimalist dot representative of spiritual perception, Red Sun and Black Clouds becomes an elemental work of art describing a conjunction of universal opposites. The artist creates a heightened tension between the brightness of the sun and the opacity of the black clouds that surround it. The combination of the sensual enjoyment of physical detail and an almost tacit sense of painterliness with a fundamentally more mystic and conceptual imagery drawn from the artist's deeper understanding of the ancient Indian art, establishes this work as one that moves beyond the merely representational into the realm of the spiritual.
For Raza, the color black is 'the mother color' from which all others are born. In this work, which takes a conventional landscape form with its suggestion of a high horizon line, Raza has focused the composition around a red bindu-like sun at the top of the painting. The bindu/sun--the cosmic egg or primordial seed of nothingness from which, in Hindu mythology, all creation is born--a mystical point of focus contrasting directly with the black clouds looming over the animated gestural touches and splashes of colorful rooftops. The paintings' expansive forms offered Raza an ideal opportunity to convey his prodigious command of gesture and color that he had honed over several decades of concentrated engagement with painting.
Red Sun and Black Clouds was painted in 1960 and one cannot help but be reminded of Cool Blast painted in the same year, a stellar work by Adolph Gottlieb, one of the most influential members of the New York school, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. Gottlieb's painting with its flaming red circle on top and black mass of clouds under it generates an elemental tension similar to Raza's. Both the artists shared the necessity to explore the range of expressive effects out of the duality of form through their powerful brushwork and manipulation of color.
In its persuasive delineation of a rich, animated landscape full of energy, vitality and detail--a very painterly world of life--rooted around the mystical and minimalist dot representative of spiritual perception, Red Sun and Black Clouds becomes an elemental work of art describing a conjunction of universal opposites. The artist creates a heightened tension between the brightness of the sun and the opacity of the black clouds that surround it. The combination of the sensual enjoyment of physical detail and an almost tacit sense of painterliness with a fundamentally more mystic and conceptual imagery drawn from the artist's deeper understanding of the ancient Indian art, establishes this work as one that moves beyond the merely representational into the realm of the spiritual.
For Raza, the color black is 'the mother color' from which all others are born. In this work, which takes a conventional landscape form with its suggestion of a high horizon line, Raza has focused the composition around a red bindu-like sun at the top of the painting. The bindu/sun--the cosmic egg or primordial seed of nothingness from which, in Hindu mythology, all creation is born--a mystical point of focus contrasting directly with the black clouds looming over the animated gestural touches and splashes of colorful rooftops. The paintings' expansive forms offered Raza an ideal opportunity to convey his prodigious command of gesture and color that he had honed over several decades of concentrated engagement with painting.
Red Sun and Black Clouds was painted in 1960 and one cannot help but be reminded of Cool Blast painted in the same year, a stellar work by Adolph Gottlieb, one of the most influential members of the New York school, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. Gottlieb's painting with its flaming red circle on top and black mass of clouds under it generates an elemental tension similar to Raza's. Both the artists shared the necessity to explore the range of expressive effects out of the duality of form through their powerful brushwork and manipulation of color.