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Lot 109

 

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“Tyeb Mehta has spent many years in the contemplation of suffering. He has condensed long histories of violence and melancholia into the most austere forms; he has delivered the freight of trauma through isolated figures delineated in planes of flat, pure color that vibrate against one another without discreet intervals of tonal shading” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Alchemical Sacrifice”, Tyeb Mehta: Paintings, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue,... “Tyeb Mehta has spent many years in the contemplation of suffering. He has condensed long histories of violence and melancholia into the most austere forms; he has delivered the freight of trauma through isolated figures delineated in planes of flat, pure color that vibrate against one another without discreet intervals of tonal shading” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Alchemical Sacrifice”, Tyeb Mehta: Paintings, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1998, not paginated). These figures are both silent victims and merciless aggressors – unforgiving goddesses fighting demons to the death, drummers celebrating joyous occasions and forewarning disaster, defeated bulls trussed and ready for slaughter, birds and humans falling through space, and browbeaten rickshaw-pullers frequently populate his canvases.

Mehta first explored the idea of the ‘falling figure’ on his return from London in the mid 1960s, and returned to the theme in the late 1980s after completing a residency at Santiniketan. Witness to the horrors of the Second World War and the Partition of India, the nature of human violence deeply affected the artist. Mehta’s falling figure is a motif of deep anguish and existential crisis, communicating the weight of personal and public violence in shaping the human experience. Here, the artist’s economical line cuts a twisted figure, part man, part animal, careening downwards in endless freefall, from the space around it.

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