Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to present Punaraagman, a recent body of works by artist SH Raza, his first solo exhibition since his return to India a few months ago. After six decades of living and practicing his art in France, between Paris and Provence, Raza has returned to India as though he were never away. One of his works has the text “Mother! What shall I fetch you when I come back home?” written across it in Devanagari script, a poignant visual counterpoint to his close emotional relationship with his motherland. Henri-Cartier Bresson, the great French photographer, had once told Raza that a work of art has to be ‘constructed’ much like a poem, a cathedral, a symphony; Form was of the essence. And it looks like Raza took that to heart, for every work of his is self contained and deeply rooted in the local, while simultaneously being accessible and connected to the larger cosmos. His works emerge as a result of the tension between the concrete and the specific on the one hand, and the abstract and the universal on the other. They are a result of his own anchored identity, as an Indian painter with a language that transverses national and cultural boundaries. His abstraction is not an illustration but rather a suggestion of the emotional and spiritual states of being, adapted into a language of colour, shapes and symbols. Syed Haider Raza was born in 1922 in Babaria, Mandla district, Madhya Pradesh. He studied at the Nagpur School of Art from 1939-43, and went on to do his formal masters training at Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay. In 1950 he received a scholarship from the Government of France, which gave him the opportunity to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Raza has since then created his own language for modernism using a large repertoire of symbols, colour tonalities, extended spaces and the vocabulary by incorporating international sensibilities. Images from nature and specifically the forests of Madhya Pradesh retain a prominent place in his mind long after he left India in 1950. His frequent visits back starting from 1960s contributed to a vast compilation of memories that would manifest themselves in various forms over the next two decades. His canvases from the 60s and 70s can be viewed as works in transition of both using abstraction and figurative and the way of treating the canvas. He maintained an intense and powerful bond with the forests, rivers and parched earth of India, which is visible in his works even today.