Riyaz Design was formed in 1997 when Alexander Gorlizki, an English artist, met Riyaz Uddin, a master Miniature painter in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

Magritte in India

Alexander who had been visiting India since 1982 had a love of traditional Indian miniature paintings. He was drawn to the sensuousness of the colours and imagery and the whimsical narratives, rendered with breath-taking skill and sensitivity. He also recognized that it was a static tradition, having developed little in terms of style or subject matter in the past 150 years. In Jaipur alone there are nearly 3,000 painters and nearly all of them focus entirely on replicating old paintings with traditional themes for the tourist market.

Alexander wanted to combine the superb technique and sensibility of Indian Miniatures with a more modern approach to painting and design: to introduce new subject matter, compositions and colour palettes as well as new narratives. He tried to imagine the Surrealist painter René Magritte working centuries ago in the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar.

Our Process

When Alexander met Riyaz he found an artist who was old enough to have developed amazing levels of skill and concentration — he had been painting for 13 years — yet was young enough to be willing to experiment and even subvert his own tradition.

Over the years they have collaborated and developed a working method in which Alexander brings together images from an eclectic variety of sources and develops new compositions, patterns and color schemes. He selects papers — new and old — as well as photographs to work on.

When the designs are fully developed Riyaz then paints in the traditional method using the single-haired brushes and paints that have been the trademark of the Indian Miniature artist for the past four centuries. The paints include ground-down stone colours, water based pigments and crushed gold leaf and the paintings are burnished with agate on marble. The resulting paintings, produced in incredible detail, include Moghul renditions of Humphrey Bogart and Sigmund Freud, cows smoking hookah pipes, flying boats and floating elephants as well as the more refined variations of European botanicals, Japanese textile patterns and classical Indian motifs.

Alexander and Riyaz have established a small workshop in Jaipur. They have exhibited their work widely in the US and Europe and their work is in the collection of the V&A, London as well as numerous private collections.

They have also applied their work to many design projects ranging from book design, packaging, stationery, advertising and editorial work as well as private commissions.