Sayed Haider Raza LH (22 February 1922 – 23 July 2016) was an Indian painter who lived and worked in France for most of his career.

[1] Born on 22 February 1922 in Kakkaiya (District Mandla), Central Provinces, British India (present-day Madhya Pradesh), Raza moved to France in 1950, marrying the French artist Janine Mongillat in 1959.

Krishen Khanna speaks of the first exhibition Raza, Akbar Padamsee and F. N. Souza mounted together at the Gallery Cruz in Paris.

Raza, however, made a throwback to the Mughal period, creating jewel-like watercolours, with the pigment rubbed in with a shell.

"[23] Once in France, he continued to experiment with currents of Western Modernism, moving from Expressionist modes towards greater abstraction and eventually incorporating elements of Tantrism from Indian scriptures.

[22][24][25] Whereas his fellow contemporaries dealt with more figural subjects, Raza chose to focus on landscapes in the 1940s and 50s, inspired in part by a move to France.

Showing a tumultuous church engulfed by an inky blue night sky, Raza uses gestural brushstrokes and a heavily impasto-ed application of paint, stylistic devices which hint at his later 1970s abstractions.

His trips to India, especially to caves of Ajanta - Ellora, followed by those to Varanasi, Gujarat and Rajasthan, made him realize his role and study Indian culture more closely, the result was "Bindu",[27] which signified his rebirth as a painter.

After the introduction of "BUNDU" (a point or the source of energy), he added newer dimensions to his thematic oeuvre in the following decades, with the inclusion of themes around the Tribhuj (Triangle),[33] which bolstered Indian concepts of space and time, as well as that of "prakriti-purusha" (the cosmic substance and the energy or the spirit respectively), his transformation from an expressionist to a master of abstraction and profundity, was complete.

[34] "My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light".- S. H. RazaRaza abandoned the expressionistic landscape for a geometric abstraction and the "Bindu".

[7] Raza perceived the Bindu as the center of creation and existence progressing towards forms and color as well as energy, sound, space and time.