Syed Haider Raza 1922 Untitled

Throughout his career Raza has been influenced by the mystical power of nature. The elements and the potency of colours and symbols to represent these elements are central to the evolution of Raza’s artistic vocabulary.  In the early years in France, Raza painted the landscapes of Europe in semi-abstracted forms but with identifiable architectural features that provide a constant link to human activity but as his works progress these identifiable elements disappear.

In 1962 Raza moved to America to teach and during this period he came into contact with the New York School of painters and he witnessed for the first t.mes the Abstract Expressionism of such artists as Sam Francis, Rothko and Pollock. Pollock’s works in particular had no formal construction or sense of spatial recession, allowing the artist greater autonomy over the pictorial space which inspired Raza to experiment in new ways.

His deconstructed landscapes serve as pictorial metaphors to express his intuitive understanding of a higher reality. The colour harmonies that he uses relate back to Rajput and Jain painting and Raza claims that upon examining traditional painting, ‘he began to realise that the relevance of the painting was not only in the subject and the theme, but in a newly perceived formal order of colour orchestration.’  (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and t.mes in Raza's Vision, New Delhi, 1990).