RAZA Sayed Haider Original Signed Lithograph Bindu Tantrik Art India Delhi 20th Century

  
Original color lithograph on paper. Signed in pencil by the artist and numbered 147/150. Dimensions: 110 cm x 55 cm.

Sayed Haider Raza was born in 1922 in Madhya Pradesh and studied painting at the Nagpur School of Art and at Sir J. A founding member of a group of Progressive artists, Raza actively participated in the Group's activities, stimulating many debates to develop a modernist language, while presenting several exhibitions of his paintings in India before leaving for France with a scholarship from the French government in 1950. In Paris, he studied painting at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1950 to 1953.

Awarded the Prix de la Critique in 1956 in Paris, Raza presented numerous exhibitions both in India and abroad. He participated in the biennials of Venice, Sao Paulo, and Menton, and presented retrospectives, the most recent in 1997 in Mumbai, Bhopal, and New Delhi. The University of California invited him as a speaker in the art department in Berkeley in 1962. In December 1978, the government of Madhya Pradesh, his birthplace, invited him for a tribute and an exhibition of his work in Bhopal.

He received the Padma Shri in 1981 and was elected a member of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1983. In 1997, Raza received the prestigious Kalidas Samman from the government of Madhya Pradesh. Raza's powerful paintings resonate with the passionate warm colors of India with all their emotional symbolic value. Drawing on childhood memories spent in the forests, he was also inspired by Indian metaphysical thought. Many of his paintings have a dark circular focal point, called the Bindu, which he believes is the source of energy and creativity.

The vibrant colors and geometric shapes in Raza's paintings have sometimes been mistaken for neo-Tantric art, but according to the artist, there is no affiliation with this school. Preoccupied with imminent energies, he is a modernist engaged with the plastic qualities of art and its emergence to the surface. Raza lived and worked in Paris and Gorbio in the south of France until recently, before returning to India.