In survey of Tyeb Mehta’s works, figuration that grapples with India’s social and political ruptures

The trussed bull, falling figures, Kali, Mahishasura, and the diagonal. Through these recurring motifs in the works on display at the first comprehensive survey of Tyeb Mehta’s five-decade practice now on display at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, the artist emerges as a modernist whose humanist concerns remain urgently resonant amid contemporary global unrest.

Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (With the Lightness of Being), curated by Roobina Karode, stands as a landmark centennial retrospective, presenting over 120 works across paintings, drawings, sculptures, the seminal film Koodal (1970), and extensive archival material.

The exhibition foregrounds his distillation of form, colour, and gesture into a stark, charged figuration that grapples with post-Independence India’s social and psychological ruptures.

The curatorial framework excels in its emphasis on process and persistence. Mehta’s evolution from the thick, frenzied impasto of the 1950s to the flat, pristine planes of later decades is traced with clarity, revealing a deliberate paring away of ornamentation toward a language of compression and fragmentation.

The bull motif, first painted in 1956 and revisited in his final works before his death in 2009, serves as a compelling throughline: sketched obsessively at the Bandra abattoir, it embodies the convergence of personal memory and collective trauma, plasticity and power, containment and freedom.

Similarly, the Falling...

Read more