Tyeb Mehta (b. 1925)

Ranjit Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta:  Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p 216 illustrated

Good overall condition. Minor surfaces grazes to upper right corner above the head.
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Tyeb Mehta's work has spanned several styles and media throughout his career. Following his visit to New York in 1968 Mehta's work underwent a reorganization in terms of composition and color application.  Large flat planes of color dominate his canvases, accompanied by figures executed with a sparseness of line that becomes a hallmark of his later paintings.

Like many artists of his generation, Mehta had been witness to the horrific events that took place in India during and after Partition and his memories of this period clearly had an immense impact on the vocabulary of the artist. Figures are constants in his work: the falling figure, the trussed bull, Durga and the Goddess Kali, all linked by the distortion of the form through violent activity. In the artist's words, "[Kali] is a fantastic image. It's a primordial image. I've always wanted to paint a mother Goddess...At Santiniketan in Bengal I could feel the presence of Kali and Durga." (Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p.346).

From very early in his career, human and divine manifestations of violence, struggle and survival came to hold deep meaning for the artist. As the critic Ranjit Hoskote explains, 'Significantly, Tyeb`s icon of choice whether Kali or Durga Mahishasuramardini has invariably been the samhara-murti, the warlike deity embodying destruction, which he prefers over the shanta-murti, the benign deity in tranquility. His quest has been for an imagery that can convey the extremity of conflict, of strife, of schism, without in the slightest way suggesting a literal explanation.' (Ranjit Hoskote, "Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta`s Art" in Tyeb Mehta - Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 18, 19).

Like Shiva in his most wrathful manifestation, Kali has a dual role for she both destroys evil and yet at a personal level destroys ignorance allowing the individual to reach higher levels of spirituality and finally break the cycle of death and rebirth. The multifaceted and at times ambiguous nature of the deity thus becomes a powerful symbol that encompasses so many aspects of Mehta's own message that Kali becomes a central motif in many of the artist's later works. Directly engaging his viewers in uncomfortable exchanges on the causes and effects of brutality, Mehta uses his unique imagery to question the role of violence in the modern world.