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Tyeb Mehta | Biography | Life | Artworks

Tyeb Mehta Biography And Artworks

The paintings of Tyeb Mehta show his competence in the handling of form as much as they reveal his sensitivity for human concerns.

He is deeply concerned with the language of painting, for as he says, he wants to convey something significant. For Tyeb the form becomes the vehicle of expression, the dress of his ideas and feelings.

He seems to reject outright what is merely a perceptual representation. At the first impression, his paintings create a flat spatial relationship.

But Tyeb treats the space that is not dependent merely upon perceptual, three-dimensional form but rather on the spatial perspective of lines and forms themselves.

The illusion of three-dimension is, in fact, created by shifting of planes, as is seen in some of his works based on Charak, the spring festival of Santhals and other works.

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The planes and forms are revealed by the arbitrary placing of light and dark or colored spaces, the effect achieved sometimes through edge-shading technique, as in his Trussed Bull, a triptych that expresses an abhorrence for brutality and the agony and pain it causes.

In Tyeb’s works, there is a careful and exact rendering of forms and objects, not of their external appearance, but of their constructional elements, of their logical forces and tensions.

He has freely distorted, cut through or ‘abstracted’ form to achieve movement relationship—a feeling of force is realized from the relationship of one mass of tone or color to another.

His paintings illustrate how the sharp-edged character of the opaque planes in the background, juxtaposed with the broken linear definition of the figure-forms is used to articulate three-dimensional space.

He chooses his images and their colors carefully with a great deal of thought and emotion. His fantastic images of Kali are represented in dark blue—an all encapsulating, terrible presence of the Goddess with her powerful, devouring mouth in red.

Tyeb’s paintings grow like a living organism in the spectator’s mind and feelings as he interacts with the meaning of their original fantasies, aims, desires and emotions expressed through their forms and colors.

They are expressive but not expressionistic. They are executed according to his vision and excite one’s imagination.

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