Important Notice

The present Lot was executed in 1963 whilst the artist was based in London. Having first visited the UK in 1954, Mehta arrived for the second time in 1959 and the five years he resided there were marked by focussing on his painting as he “opened himself to the museums, galleries and discussion of that seminal period.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Ideas Images Exchanges, 2005, p.12 )

Situation is a product of the engagement the thirty-eight year old... The present Lot was executed in 1963 whilst the artist was based in London. Having first visited the UK in 1954, Mehta arrived for the second time in 1959 and the five years he resided there were marked by focussing on his painting as he “opened himself to the museums, galleries and discussion of that seminal period.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Ideas Images Exchanges, 2005, p.12 )

Situation is a product of the engagement the thirty-eight year old Indian was having with the “harsh, brushy textured, impasto-laden expressionism aligned with the School of Paris models.” (Ibid p.5) The work shows this new engagement whilst exuding the skill and refined taste that Mehta had already displayed from the mid-1950s as a painter in India.

The Lot pre-empts both the first falling figure pictures of the mid-60s and the pictures executed after the artist’s visit to New York in 1968. Here, the figure in space and the bull’s head are painted with an immediacy of a heavily textured application that carries all the energy and raw power of interiorised images suddenly revealed. Here, a mid-career Tyeb Mehta displays the vitality of a great painter realising his potential as a potent transmitter of emotion.

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