"My inspiration comes to me through the thoughts of others, painters or musicians, such that Ustad said: look with your ears and listen with your eyes."
The painter Sayed-Haider Raza was born in Barbaria, Madhya Prudesh in India in 1922. He spent his childhood with his father, a forestry worker in the still virgin forests of central India. It is this environment that undoubtedly forms the ‘archives’ of his memory and permits him to develop a strong and intuitive sensibility. After his training at the School of Fine Arts in Nagpur in 1939, he intregrates in1943, into the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay where he received his diploma.
In Bombay, the young artist is one of the founders of the ‘Progressive Artists Group’. Raza obtains a grant from the Indian government and France allows him to come study at the Beaux-Arts School of Paris in 1950 until 1953. In 1956 he wins the very coveted ‘Prix de la Critique’ (Critics Prize) awarded by 14 Parisian art critics. Very early on Raza participates in numerous group exhibitions (Salon de Mai, Biennale de Sao Paulo, Salon Comparaisons in Paris, etc. ). He equally participates over the course of time in events exclusively dedicated to contemporary Indian art (Washington, London, Oxford, Paris, New York, etc.). From 1959, the artist shows his work in solo exhibitions, which the first in a long list is in Paris at the Lara Vincy Gallery.
Abstract landscape artist in his first period, he evolves little by little towards abstract-geometric painting, then towards painting that is above all, spiritual. Raza regularly returns to India where he is able to remain in contact with his traditional culture that inspires all his work. Having integrated partly into the western adventure of art, he is more and more swept away by the mandala (sacred circle) and the bindu (the primordial point, the seed of the origin of life) that each person con find inside himself. Raza transcribes again his own vision of the perceptible and the imperceptible and his art includes primordial elements: earth, water, fire.
The artist received all the honors and the highest distinction of his country. Sayed-Haider Raza today lives and works between Paris and Gorbio, a little village in the countryside of Nice.
The painter Sayed-Haider Raza was born in Barbaria, Madhya Prudesh in India in 1922. He spent his childhood with his father, a forestry worker in the still virgin forests of central India. It is this environment that undoubtedly forms the ‘archives’ of his memory and permits him to develop a strong and intuitive sensibility. After his training at the School of Fine Arts in Nagpur in 1939, he intregrates in1943, into the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay where he received his diploma. 
