Painted in 1964, the present lot represents a key period in Sayed Haider Raza's career, during which he began to experiment with a less structured pictorial space and explored the translucent play of color in nature.

In 1962, while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Raza encountered and was deeply impacted by the work of Abstract Expressionists painters like Sam Francis, Hans Hoffman and Mark Rothko. Describing how his encounter with Rothko’s work changed him, he notes, “It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy. Rothko's works brought back the images of japmala, where the repetition of a word continues till you achieve a state of elated consciousness. Rothko's works made me understand the feel for spatial perception." (Artist statement, Raza: Celebrating 85 Years, New Delhi, 2007, unpaginated)

At the same time as he was deeply moved by the artistic freedom of the American avant-garde, Raza began to return to India regularly from 1959 onwards, leading him to question how to express the intersection of influences from East and West. He was raised by a forest ranger in Madhya Pradesh and the Indian landscape had a lasting resonance in his imagination and never truly left him. In the early 1960s, Raza began to integrate vital elements of his Indian childhood and cultural heritage into his paintings. “I have never really left the deep rooted, wonderful world of forest and rambling river, hill and sparkling stream. The time spent as nature’s child. You see, we lived in the country’s core, in Barbaria, Madhya Pradesh, where my father was a forest ranger, in the Mandla afterwards. The lush Kanha thickets were my regular haunts. Highly impressionable at that tender age, I soaked in every single feature of that beautiful landscape.” (Artist statement, Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 156-157)

The depictions of the French countryside in his paintings became more fractured and abstracted as he experimented with a new mood-evoking style and palette. There are barely any visual clues that contextualize the scene. Instead, the artist has chosen to focus exclusively on light and color, working with a fluidity that had not been seen in his work before, as he shifted from using oils to acrylic, which allowed his brushstrokes more agility and freedom. Spots of oranges and vermilions emerge from a deep yet translucent surface, reminiscent of fragile rays of light reflecting in the darkness of the night. Here, Raza reveals an abstract composition animated by color, which reflects the artist's complex and fascinating aesthetic journey.