Two shows of works by a master painter and a world-renowned photo artist

A noteworthy exhibition at RL Fine Arts, New York presents selected works by legendary artist SH Raza. His masterful paintings express the nature’s beauty through watercolor landscapes, through to dynamic abstractions, and into captivating compositions concentrated around the bindu. La Terre (1985), a masterpiece on view, marks the crucible period wherein he was moving into the area of more geometric paintings built around ancient, totemic symbols and shapes away from abstracted landscape.

On the other hand, Bindu (1992) celebrates the joy of life, nature and creation with SH Raza building a composition around many devices that offer multiples of meaning: tree of life, kundalini, yin-yang, bindu, which collate in a frenzied unity of color. Germination, from the same year, testifies the painter’s mastery over color and tone. The repeated shapes woven around the bindu reverberate to lead to a meditative state. Nad Bindu (1995) expresses the beauty of white and black as the artist deliberately removes the bright primary colors to explore the different variations in monochromatic tones.

Another milestone event is a major retrospective exhibition of photographic works by Dayanita Singh at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam. The Indian photographer is internationally renowned for the highly expressive and poetic quality of her work, whose incidence of light and visual construction are meticulously composed.

They comment on society and her own past. By the early 1990s she was snapping at her immediate surroundings, discarding journalistic approach. Her series on the eunuch ‘Mona Ahmed’ marked a critical point at which she chose to go her own way as a photographer. ‘I am as I am’ (1999) was an intimate series that portrayed female inmates of an ashram in Benares.

Her portrait series ‘Ladies of Calcutta’ and ‘Privacy’ depicted the world of her own origins - that of her family and friends from the higher class. With ‘Go Away Closer’ she started working in an increasingly free and associative manner. The absence of people was manifest in empty rooms and spaces and in remarkable still life images of day-to-day objects. ‘Blue Book’ and ‘Dream Villa’ remain omnipresent in details and even in the color and light.