Kings Road Gallery & Tanya Baxter Contemporary, London, United Kingdom

Bindu by Syed Haider Raza

Syed Haider Raza Biography

Syed Haider Raza or S.H. Raza (born 1922, Babaria ) is an eminent Indian artist who has lived and worked in France since 1950, but maintains strong ties with India. His works are mainly abstracts in oil or acrylic, with a very rich use of colour, with icons from Indian cosmology as well as its philosophy. He was awarded the Padma Shri and Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1981 and Padma Bhushan in 2007 . At a December 2006 auction, a painting by Raza sold for US $1.4 million .

S.H. Raza started to draw and to study art at age 12 and after his high school, he studied further at the Nagpur School of Art, Nagpur, followed by Sir J. J. School of Art, in Bombay before moving to France in 1950 to study at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSB-A) in Paris. After his studies, he travelled across Europe and continued to live and exhibit his work in Paris. Once in France, he tried to experiment with currents of Western Modernism moving from Expressionist modes towards greater abstraction and eventually incorporating elements of Tantrism from Indian scriptures. Whereas his fellow contemporaries dealt with more figural subjects, Raza chose to focus on landscapes inspired in part by France. He was later awarded the Prix de la critique in Paris in 1956, and was the first non-French artist receive the honour. His work is an ongoing evolution from painting expressionistic landscapes to abstract ones. From his fluent water colours of landscapes and townscapes executed in the early 40's he moved towards a more expressive language representing -landscapes of the mind.

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