OUR COSMIC DOT

Raza: The Other Modern offers a well-rounded assessment of the art of Sayed Haider Raza

- Aman Nath

When Sayed Haider Raza arrived in Paris in 1952, aged 28, he carried deep within him the resonance of India, silent and cocooned. It was wrapped in many layers of colonisation and comp­ lexes that his Western art practice eventually gave him courage to unravel layer by layer, to arrive at a cerebral geometric abstraction for the world to sit back and take note of with awe.

The book under review is a companion volume to a recently concluded Raza retrospective, held in Dubai, a convergent city suspended between East and West. Seeking a bal­ ance between material realisation and its pester­ ing, unfulfilled quest, the Progressive Art Gallery director Harshvardhan Singh calls Raza’s artistic evolution “a testimony to his relentless pursuit of truth through colour and form”.