In Delhi, the walls of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) adorn S.H. Raza’s paintings which appear to be like massive windows giving a peep into the many phases of Raza’s transnational modernism. The vignettes progress thematically from Raza’s nature-based landscapes to cityscapes — captured both in India and France — and transit through his metaphysical and spiritual leanings from symbolic to geometric abstraction.
The month-long exhibition, titled Traversing Space - Here & Beyond, pays tribute to Raza on his 100th birth anniversary. It has been organised by the KNMA in association with the Raza Foundation and Bikaner House.
KNMA curator Roobina Karode feels Raza’s life and art cannot be encapsulated in a single show, but the museum has attempted at highlighting his ruminations on his preferred themes such as La Terre, Bhoomi, Germination, Birthing of Triangles and Bindu. KNMA’s collection on Indian modernists focuses on the Progressive Artists’ Group of Bombay, which was initiated by Raza in 1947 along with F.N. Souza and M.F. Husain, and has collected seminal, rare and substantive works by Raza, acquired from various sources over the years. “We have been building an in-depth collection on artworks created in the 1950s and 1960s in India,” informs KNMA founder and chairperson Kiran Nadar.
The exhibition features archival material and photographs loaned from the Delhi-based Raza Foundation and a few works from personal collections of private collectors and gallerists. The curatorial framework and narrative decided which works were best suited to unfold the story of his life and art as it evolved.
“For Raza, his works were never abstract; they were loaded with content and meaning and of course carried titles that oriented the viewer to individual works,” opines Kiran.
Split into various sections, the exhibition starts with Raza’s early works and proceeds through his creative phases, increasing interest in the mystical notions and spiritual dimensions of abstraction, especially the symbolism of the bindu (dot) which became the central and consistent motif in the artist’s comprehension of the cosmos.
His paintings La Terre, Germination and Saurashtra reflect his exposure to modern masters in the West, Indian philosophies and miniature painting traditions, which inspired Raza to work on Nature’s five primordial principles and elements ( panchabhutas and panchatatvas). These paintings exploring terrains and rivers, rural habitats, small towns and metropolises, were rooted within varied landscapes from India and beyond. Around the late 1970s, Raza’s expression evolved into a symbolic or geometric abstraction and his vocabulary articulated elementary shapes like the circle and the triangle. Bindu, the circle that represents the breath of the universe, in its concentric presence alluded to its expansion and contraction.
Apart from paintings, the exhibition also displays hand-written letters sent to Raza by Tyeb Mehta and MF Hussain. “The KNMA believes in and celebrates Raza’s artistic practice and acknowledges his influence on younger generations of artists too,” explains Kiran. The exhibition is reminiscent of Raza’s distinct language which expresses both indigenous and the universal, the contingent and the eternal. In a world divided by borders and rising insularities, it is inspiring to engage Raza’s intense and luminous corpus of works that challenges many of the prevailing assumptions of the present, says Roobina.
The artworks are not on sale and are displayed at Bikaner House. On till June 30.
