New Delhi: Famous painter S.H. Raza who popularised globally several Indian concepts and iconography and built a towering legacy of modern art passed away here on Saturday after prolonged illness, leaving a huge void in the artistic world. He was 94.
The acclaimed painter, who depicted concepts like ‘bindu’, ‘purush-prakriti’ and ‘nari’ in his instantly recognisable geometric abstract works, passed away at 11 am.
“He was in the ICU at a hospital here for the past two months and passed away today. It is indeed a very sad day. He was a great legend that the 20th Century has produced,” poet and former chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi Ashok Vajpeyi said.
He was awarded the Padma Shri and Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1981, the Padma Bhushan in 2007 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2013.
As a co-founder of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group together with F.N. Souza, K.H. Ara, M.F. Husain, H.A. Gade, S.K. Bakre and others, Raza passed quickly into an engagement with a stylised reinterpretation of retinal reality in the 1950s.
Interestingly, Raza’s interest in the bindu stems from his childhood days when his primary school teacher asked him to stare at a dot on the wall to calm his distracted mind; the dot would go on to influence the course of his life.
