.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 1962, this rich expressionist Untitled (Landscape) shows the evolution of S.H. Raza's work since the early 50s."The schema remains much the same, analogous in any case, but the picture undergoes a variety of transformations, just as the artist's personality, unchanging in essence, constantly reflects the impacts - now more, now less intense - from outside [...] The composition is made to expand and contract [...] Walls of houses are no longer smooth planes, they are broad beaches strewn with the hulks of burnt out energies. Behind a foreground of glowing embers or darkling plains looms a mass of lustrous houses." (Jacques Lassaigne in A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, Hyderabad, 2007, p. 73) The houses, churches and flattened architecture that were once so ridged and schematic have now entirely dissolved into a symphony of gesture and color.
This painting was executed in the same year as Raza's 1962 visit to the USA and Canada where he was invited as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. On these travels he was exposed to abstract expressionist color field painter Mark Rothko. "Rothko's work opened up lots of interesting associations for me. It was so different from the insipid realism of the European School. It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy." (Raza: Celebrating 85 years, exhibition catalogue, Aryan Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2007)
Raza's attitude and use of color takes on a vital role becoming a subject matter itself. "Colours were not being used as merely formal elements: they were emotionally charged. [..], reflecting or embodying emotive content. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity -- colours started to carry the light load of emotions more than ever before. [...] They are emotional essays in colour. (A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, Hyderabad, 2007, p. 78)
This painting was executed in the same year as Raza's 1962 visit to the USA and Canada where he was invited as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. On these travels he was exposed to abstract expressionist color field painter Mark Rothko. "Rothko's work opened up lots of interesting associations for me. It was so different from the insipid realism of the European School. It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy." (Raza: Celebrating 85 years, exhibition catalogue, Aryan Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2007)
Raza's attitude and use of color takes on a vital role becoming a subject matter itself. "Colours were not being used as merely formal elements: they were emotionally charged. [..], reflecting or embodying emotive content. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity -- colours started to carry the light load of emotions more than ever before. [...] They are emotional essays in colour. (A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, Hyderabad, 2007, p. 78)