The sale dedicated to Modern and Contemporary Art on Wednesday November 25th, 2020 presents a selection of some of the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century. This new auction organized by PIASA is an opportunity to highlight the work of Sayed Haider Raza.
Considered the first modern Indian painter, Sayed Haider Raza is now internationally renowned. After training at the school of the Bombay Fine Arts Institute, he joined the avant-garde and became one of the founding members of the Progressive Artists Group, created to promote the development of contemporary Indian art. In Paris, where Raza went in the early 1950s thanks to a grant from the French government, he studied at the School of Fine Arts and took part in several Salons (Mai, Comparison).
His work, a synthesis of Western culture and Eastern spirituality, is linked in its first period to the movement of abstract landscape painting. A pure abstract composition, "Les Vignes" (1967) plays with the appearance of light in the chaos of dark forms, leading to a dissolution of their contours but also a feeling of breathing. Raza applies with a light touch and removes the paint, whose chromatic variations range from ochre to brown through light greens.
Sayed Haider Raza (1922-2016)
Les Vignes, (P-700), 1967
Estimate: 50000 / 70000 €
These tones, both earthy and luminous, reflect the spiritual and inner dimension of Raza's painting, about which Jacques Lassaigne wrote: "Raza made a great effort to animate her vision, to nourish it with concrete contributions. Her forms developed in their contrasts, the light exalting itself from the neighbouring opacity. Raza always painted an imaginary world, crossed by tragic intensities but on the overlapping of her coloured planes the energies were concentrated. A whole network of violently coloured veins circulated in the impasto of the matter. The deep blacks were pierced by dazzling reds and yellows. Effects of tension and nervous agitation upset the shadowy areas. The composition itself was affected and in the same work the hurried beating of the forms, so that the character could be assimilated to anguish, was opposed to vast serene and clear areas. Thus, always faithful to his deepest feelings, Raza sought to free himself from the oppression of the night and to exalt the calm found in the morning light. »
