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Lot Essay
Tyeb Mehta's Untitled figure preserves and anticipates a transition in his oeuvre. Painted a year before Tyeb travelled to New York on the Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1968, this work is the culmination of his earlier period. "Through the 1950s and 1960s, Tyeb practiced a harsh, brushy textured, impasto-laden expressionism aligned with the School of Paris models cherished by his generation of Indian artists [...] Later during the mid-1960s, he passed on to a freer handling from a painterly viewpoint; he seemed to conjure his figures from flame and cloud". (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta, Images and Exchanges, Delhi, 2005, p. 5). The increasingly stylized sitting figure retains Tyeb's typically gestural treatment of form whilst the textural roughness, ever-present in earlier work, recedes. Tyeb's abstracted figure appears monumental, rendered substantial and sculptural against the flat background of subtle tonalities.
The single figure fractured and tormented is a rhetorical reiteration of the artists career long concern for the human condition. The writings of French Existentialists, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andr Gide and Andr Malraux fuelled Tyeb's obsession with fate and the decrepitude of human existence. "These gurus of the age informed Tyeb and his contemporaries in their understanding of human vulnerability, the scope of choice available within the limitations imposed by social convention, [and] the degrees of freedom that the individual could wrest from the realm of necessity." (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta, Images and Exchanges, Delhi, 2005, p. 6) Tyeb Mehta's Untitled figure is one of his last works in this gestural figuration but reaffirms the existential iteration of the human condition that he would dominate his paintings for years to come.
The single figure fractured and tormented is a rhetorical reiteration of the artists career long concern for the human condition. The writings of French Existentialists, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andr Gide and Andr Malraux fuelled Tyeb's obsession with fate and the decrepitude of human existence. "These gurus of the age informed Tyeb and his contemporaries in their understanding of human vulnerability, the scope of choice available within the limitations imposed by social convention, [and] the degrees of freedom that the individual could wrest from the realm of necessity." (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta, Images and Exchanges, Delhi, 2005, p. 6) Tyeb Mehta's Untitled figure is one of his last works in this gestural figuration but reaffirms the existential iteration of the human condition that he would dominate his paintings for years to come.