Echoing the “SHRaza” exhibition at the Center Pompidou, the Guimet Museum explores the influence of Tibetan mandalas on the work of Indian artist Sayed Haider Raza (1922 – 2016), a major figure in modern art. Six paintings by Raza will be installed next to the mandalas from the Musée Guimet collections, thus highlighting the comparable symbolic principles that can be found in the artist's works.

Trained at the JJ School of Arts in Bombay, he arrived in Paris in 1950 to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. The first foreign artist to win the Prix de la critique in 1956, he lived in France for 60 years and established in his art a fruitful and uninterrupted dialogue between his two cultures. Marked by Independence and the Partition of India, he participated in the founding of the Progressive Artists' Group in a political context of fracture. Influenced by the School of Paris in the landscapes produced from the 1950s, his work is also nourished by the pure and vibrant colors of his childhood, the raga – melodic frameworks of Indian classical music – and Sanskrit, Hindu and Urdu. In the 1980s, in a singular and radical evolution, Raza's painting tended towards the simplification of forms. Geometry becomes essential for the artist; a definitive orchestration that he will deploy until the end of his life. The compositions entitled "bindu", in Sanskrit "point", "drop", "seed", refer to the cyclical conception of time, to the perpetual renewal of nature.

For Raza, “the bindu symbolizes the seminal power of all life. It is also a visible form which contains all the essential plastic components, line, tonality, color, gesture and space. From the bindu, a black, dense and deep central point – the “mother color” of Indian thought – radiate colorful geometric shapes: circles, triangles, squares, rectangles. Just as Tibetan mandalas are the visual support of Buddhist meditation and are based on the geometric representation of symbols, Sayed Haider Raza's works appear like yogic yantras revealing the expansion of Creation, from the center to the periphery.