S.H.RAZA (b.1922 - 2016) Born in Babaria, Madhya Pradesh, he studied first at Nagpur and later at the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai. He was a founding member of the Progressive Artists Group. The French Government granted him a scholarship in 1950 to study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris for three years. He won the Prix de la Critique in 1956 and in 1962 became a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1956) Paris (1957), Bruges and Sao Paulo (1958), Morocco (1963), Menton (from 1964), the commonwealth Institute, London (1962), Contemporary Indian Painting, Royal Academy of Arts, London (1982), Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris (1985) and contemporary Indian Art, Grey Art Gallery, New York (1985). He has had numerous solo shows and is also represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Musee National d'Art Miderbe, Paris, the Asia Society, New York and the Musee de Menton, France. He mainly lives and works in Paris with his French wife, the artist Janine Mongillat. STATEMENT Painting is not a question only of intellectual deliberation and analysis. Certainly an artist must have a way of thinking that helps him. He's a worker, he's an everyday worker, and the most important requisite is that he should be passionately interested in doing what he's doing. With one single thing we can reach eternity. But after the period of wanderings, travels, readings, discussions, meetings, all that is extremely useful in the formative period, you have to come back to your self. You have to empty your self, arrive at a state of rest. You have to start again and hopefully it is only then that life starts. My present work is the result of two parallel enquiries. Firstly, it aimed at pure plastic order, for-order. Secondly, it concerns the theme of Nature. Both have converged into a single point and become inseparable. The point, the bindu, symbolises the seed bearing the potential of all life, in a sense. It's also a visible form containing all the essential requisites of line, tone, colour, texture and space. The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfillment.