Syed Haider Raza (b. 1922)

Galerie Dresdnere, Montreal, 1962

Good overall condition. Minor vertical cracks along extreme edges where canvas meets frame, visible at center left and center right.
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The current work, Village, was acquired in 1962 at Syed Haider Raza’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Dresdnere in Montreal, where he was represented from 1962-1968. From a private Canadian collection, Raza’s very fine early work, the pristine expressionist Village, has not been viewed by the public since. 

Raza’s stormy palette, marked with bright moments of Basolhi red, is a quintessential example of work from his early period. Whilst living in Paris in the early 1950s, Raza experimented with Impressionist and Expressionist concepts and moved slowly toward a European Modernist bent by the end of the decade. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he moved gradually toward abstraction, and finally toward the geometric compositions influenced by the yantras of classical Indian art which he is still practicing today.

In France in the early 1950s, Raza painted the landscapes of Europe in semi-abstracted form, with a discernable armature and architecture still present in his work. Toward the end of the decade, however, these identifiable elements begin to merge into semi-abstraction, leaving the viewer with an abstracted landscape reduced to the most basic common denominator–a deft, spare sweep of the palette knife to suggest a steeple, a small cluster of houses on a hill, a mountainous backdrop and the setting sun above–foreshadowing Raza’s dazzling experimentation with pure abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s.

Herein the artist employs gestural brushstrokes that hint at the stylistic devices and fluid abstraction that will completely dominate his canvases in the mid-1970s. Village, with its geometric urban elements merging with abstracted skies and fields below is the conceptual forerunner to Raza’s iconic paintings of the 1970s such as La Terre and Tapovan.