While a lot of contemporary art in India remains in a narcissistic bubble dedicated to its own self-reflexive trajectory, and some artists making laughing stock of themselves with derivative fluff, a historic show of Tyeb Mehta at Vadehras curated by critic and curator Yashodhara Dalmia will throw light on art emerging from struggled zones of experience through the abstractions to where it really bleeds.

Inspiration from real life in volatile regions can bring new meaning to what it feels to be a troubled artist. According to Ranjit Hoskote, author and editor of Ideas Images Exchanges, Tyeb Mehta has spent many years in the contemplation of suffering. He has condensed long histories of violence and melancholia into the most austere forms; he has delivered the freight of trauma through isolated figures delineated in planes of flat color that vibrate against one another without discreet intervals of tonal shading.
In Delhi at Vadehras, a slew of works, canvasses, drawings and his Trussed Bull sculptures will zoom in on the magical momentuousness of India’s greatest contemporary artist who lit the light in the world of auctions. While Christie’s and Sotheby’s and Saffronart have had stupendous luck, the evolution of Tyeb Mehta’s genius is a journey to behold. At Vadehras will be a number of fascinating Falling Birds by Tyeb.
Perhaps less well documented in relation to his work is the fact that the Falling Figure contained powerful symbolic value for Bacon too. In Bacon’s celebrated work Triptych (1976), the central panel is dominated by the figure of a headless body savaged by a swirling bird of prey whose wingspan spirals downwards.
The unusual combination of the imagery of a slaughterhouse with that of a falling figure combines two important symbols of Tyeb’s own artistic vocabulary, that of the slaughtered bull and the falling figure and so it is inevitable that Tyeb would have felt an affinity towards this type of imagery. However, it seems unlikely that Tyeb drew his entire inspiration from the same Western sources as Bacon; his treatment of the subject is certainly very different from Bacon’s throughout its various appearances in his work. In most instances, the Bird and Falling Figure seem more closely intertwined than in Bacon’s interpretation and both characters seem to be involved in this crisis moment of frozen freefall. Interestingly, as far back as the 90’s, Ranjit Hoskote saw the falling figure in Tyeb’s work as a symbol of “the fall” of mankind which is clearly intimated in his work of the same title.
Figures are constants in Tyeb’s work and nearly all of them are linked by the distortion of form through violent activity. The figure is either the victim of violence or has the pent up primal potential for acts of violence. In the current work, the figure plunges through darkness with limbs intertwined with a bird of monumental proportions. Yet despite the distortion of limbs and the inherent violence of the imagery, the potency of Tyeb’s work lies in the balance of harmonious tones and lines within a deceptively simple composition. Both Bacon and Tyeb elevate their protagonists to epic existential proportions but through different means and to different effect. Both use ancient mythological imagery as an “armature” on which to hang their own feelings, concerning the fate of Man in the contemporary world, but whilst the figures produced by Bacon are dripping with the fleshy constraints of the earthly realm, Tyeb’s central figures are elevated to a mythical realm where the violence appears serene, like an act of final sacrifice or ultimate salvation and the anguish of the central character demands our pathos.
Ranjit has said that a primary experience of shock resonates at the core of Tyeb Mehta’s figuration. It is difficult to come away from one of his paintings without sensing a disquiet that is barely held in check by the seam of the line; an anguish bursts against the skin of the pigment. Nothing can completely still this primary experience of shock. Standing before these often monumental-scale frames, we bear helpless witness to the predicaments into which the artist knits his singular, isolated protagonists.
To enjoy the sojourn at Vadehras, is to understand the making of a genius, to get beneath the truth that Tyeb Mehta was a voracious reader, an avid follower of the Italian writer Italo Calvinho. And Tyeb was the gentleman of Indian art, with chaste manners and an old world charm that brought out reverence in anyone who met and spent time with him. He experienced personally the “tangled wreckage of contemporary society” and vividly remembers the violence that he witnessed during his childhood in India. He said, “One incident left a deep impression on me. At the time of the Partition, I was living on Mohammed Ali Road. I remember a young man being slaughtered in the street below my window. The crowd beat him to death, smashed his head with stones. I was sick with fever for days afterwards and the image still haunts me today. That violence gave me a clue about the emotion I want to paint. That violence has stuck in my mind.”
Almost 20 years later in 1965, during the war with Pakistan, he visited the frontlines as part of a government-sponsored project, the experience left a deep impression upon the artist and perhaps the horrors of war reignited his memories of the Partition, for it was in the same year that he painted the first of the Falling Figure Series. The work won him a gold medal at India’s first Triennale following which he was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation Grant to work and study in the US. After New York, his canvasses underwent a reorganisation both in terms of composition and the application of colour.
Large flat planes of colour dominated the works, accompanied by figures executed with a sparseness of line that became a hallmark of his later works. Tyeb’s words to this critic in 2005, appear to rewind: “For me life has so many paradoxes and memories. I remember Husain telling me once in a Nizamuddin dhaba— ‘You don’t know how to apply colour. Your colour zones are too flat , usme maza nahi hai.’” At Vadehras, this show is a silent tribute and the timing couldn’t have been better.
Show opens on January 15