Important Notice

"Unless an image moves me emotionally, I don't use it." - TYEB MEHTA

The Falling Figure has entranced connoisseurs and collectors over the years for the intensity of emotion it captured in the moment of absolute distress. Krishen Khanna, fellow artist and a dear friend of Mehta, was among the first to recognise the force of Mehta's art. In an introductory note to the exhibition of Mehta's paintings at the Kumar Gallery... "Unless an image moves me emotionally, I don't use it." - TYEB MEHTA

The Falling Figure has entranced connoisseurs and collectors over the years for the intensity of emotion it captured in the moment of absolute distress. Krishen Khanna, fellow artist and a dear friend of Mehta, was among the first to recognise the force of Mehta's art. In an introductory note to the exhibition of Mehta's paintings at the Kumar Gallery in 1966, Khanna writes, "You keep asking a question of us all and the process of examination of our values is continuous." Khanna acquired one of the earliest Falling Figures (top), similar to the present lot, and entered it in the First Triennale of Contemporary World Art in New Delhi in 1968. Th at painting was one of two gold medal winning works in the Indian section of the Triennale.

In Ideas Images Exchanges, poet and art critic Dilip Chitre cites a review of Mehta's early Falling Figures: "...in the simple act of falling, Tyeb takes us on into a metaphysical riddle. The falling is vertiginous; and metaphorically expresses man's freedom in the very act of infinite questing. It is the adventure of floating alone on a sea of awareness, or getting sucked, unresisting, down its velvet vortices." (The Link, 20 February 1966, as quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, Ramchandra Gandhi et. al., Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 326)

The present lot, painted in 1965, is among the earliest of the iconic Falling Figure series that Mehta began in the mid-sixties. Within the hazy, ephemeral, flesh-toned forms that emerge from a sea of blue, one finds the seeds of what would become the seminal series of Mehta's career. Mehta's Falling Figure series of paintings are compositions of fractured planes, distorted limbs and agonised faces, falling into an undefined abyss. A sense of unease and disorientation results from the gravity-defying fall, caught in the act of dropping into the unknown.

Mehta's life was indelibly marked by the Partition. The sectarian violence remained the underlying element in his oeuvre. In its depiction of reigned in violence, the painting evokes the notion of the Absurd, conveying a fundamental sense of disharmony which was so urgently explored by artists and writers in the post-war climate of Europe. It was only logical that Mehta, who shared similar struggles with the self, would be drawn to this philosophy in his art.

"In Tyeb's paintings, the figure is the bearer of all drama, momentum and crisis, a detonation against the ground it occupies and commands; by contrast, the field appears, at first sight, to be all flattened colour, a series of bland, featureless planes that impede the manifestation of the figure, or even fragment the figure into intriguing shards. Only gradually does the eye, unpuzzling the painting, recognise that Tyeb treats figure and field as interlocked and not separate entities. His paintings derive their enigmatic compound of shock and coolness, anguish and elegance, from the complex interweave of these elements." (Hoskote et. al., p. 4)

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