Untitled

Sayed Haider Raza painted this Untitled landscape in 1979, capping off a decade in which he increasingly embraced the symbolic power of color in his work. Discernible elements of the landscape, as seen in his earlier works from the 1950s, dissolved during the 1960s and early 1970s, and were replaced by expressionistic explosions of color. In paintings like the present lot, color denoted place through the emotion it evoked in the artist. To Raza, color became as fundamental a part of expressing the sense of a place as its representative features, if not more. Alongside color, Raza's gestural brushwork further expressed the emotions and spirituality he associated with nature and the landscape. “Physical location did not necessarily mean a spiritual and creative dislocation […] For him hereafter art was to be his home, reconstructed through memory, resonance and imagination. It was soon to be also his spiritual haven, a space where he could connect with the infinite, the limitless and the timeless” (A. Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 98).

In the 1970s, Raza held two landmark exhibitions in Stavanger, Norway - a group show in 1976, and a solo exhibition three years later. The present lot, which was exhibited in the latter show in November 1979, is painted almost entirely in exquisite tones of blue, punctuated only by a few flashes of white and green. Perhaps the sublime beauty of the Norwegian landscape, with its blue fjords, played a part in inspiring the artist. Here, the gem-like blues that shimmer across the flattened surface of the canvas create dynamic ripples of movement. Shining like a sapphire, this small-format landscape also anticipates the deeper exploration of the color Raza would undertake as his practice embraced symbolic geometry. In these works, alongside forms, the artist used the five primary colors to represents the basic elements of nature and all their associations in the cycles of life.