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Lot Essay
"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." (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta, Images and Exchanges, Delhi, 2005, p. 5)
Painted in 1963, Tyeb Mehta's figure preserves and anticipates a transition in his oeuvre. It is during this period that Tyeb Mehta enjoys the artistic influence of the west and incorporates it into his own oeuvre. Mehta left India fro England in 1959 where he lived for five years and became acquainted first hand with the School of Paris and immersed himself in European Modernism.
This painting with its increasingly stylized seated figure retains Mehta's typically gestural treatment of form maintaining the textural roughness, ever-present in earlier work. Mehta'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 artist's preoccupation with the human condition. The writings of French Existentialists fuelled Mehta'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)
Painted in 1963, Tyeb Mehta's figure preserves and anticipates a transition in his oeuvre. It is during this period that Tyeb Mehta enjoys the artistic influence of the west and incorporates it into his own oeuvre. Mehta left India fro England in 1959 where he lived for five years and became acquainted first hand with the School of Paris and immersed himself in European Modernism.
This painting with its increasingly stylized seated figure retains Mehta's typically gestural treatment of form maintaining the textural roughness, ever-present in earlier work. Mehta'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 artist's preoccupation with the human condition. The writings of French Existentialists fuelled Mehta'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)