Untitled (Bois des Amants)

S. H. Raza never essayed figuration in his works, except very sparingly in his early career. That makes the allusion to two figures in this work a rarity. Yet, Raza dexterously uses expressionist brush strokes in the overall vocabulary of his abstract expressionism, with which he created some of his most famous landscapes of the period. He had already been a decade in France by the time he painted this work, creating realistic and then expressionist landscapes of the French countryside. This work is an example of the latter where the two figures refer to the 1960 French film, Le Bois des Amants (Lovers’ Wood) an impossible love between a French soldier and a German officer’s wife.