Tyeb Mehta (B.1925)

Born in Gujarat in 1925 Tyeb Mehta spent an initial period working as a film editor in a cinema laboratory. Its interest in painting however took him to the Sir J.J. School of Art from where he received his diploma in 1952. A close friend of the Progressive Artists Group with considerable stylistic affiliation he left for London where he lived and worked between 1959 and 1964. He visited the U. S. on a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1968. His film Koodal, a powerful depiction of the ordinary man's dilemma won the Filmfare Critic's Award in 1970. As an Artist in Residence in Santiniketan between 1984-85 he returned to Mumbai with significant changes in his work.

Like most other artists of the Progressive Artists Movement in India, Mehta could trace his influence to the European masters. His inspiration came from the macabre distortion used by artist Francis Bacon, which can be seen even in the handling of the face and the body of his most recent works, before his death in 2009. Of his early works, Mehta had this to say: "When you are young, you try to understand the world. As you grow old, you try to understand yourself. Your work then becomes the essence of these efforts." Tyeb Mehta passed away on 2nd July, 2009.

Style of work Mehta's preoccupation with formalist means of expression have led to matt surfaces, broken with diagonals and imagery which while expressing a deep anguish is specifically painterly. In recent years, there has been a vivid articulation of mythological figures like Kali in a mode mist, symbolic manner. Increasingly his work uses imagery which is ancient yet powerfully modem.