In survey of Tyeb Mehta’s works, figuration that grapples with India’s social and political ruptures

The trussed bull, falling figures, Kali, Mahishasura, and the diagonal. Through these recurring motifs in the works on display at the first comprehensive survey of Tyeb Mehta’s five-decade practice now on display at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, the artist emerges as a modernist whose humanist concerns remain urgently resonant amid contemporary global unrest.

Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (With the Lightness of Being), curated by Roobina Karode, stands as a landmark centennial retrospective, presenting over 120 works across paintings, drawings, sculptures, the seminal film Koodal (1970), and extensive archival material.

The exhibition foregrounds his distillation of form, colour, and gesture into a stark, charged figuration that grapples with post-Independence India’s social and psychological ruptures.

The curatorial framework excels in its emphasis on process and persistence. Mehta’s evolution from the thick, frenzied impasto of the 1950s to the flat, pristine planes of later decades is traced with clarity, revealing a deliberate paring away of ornamentation toward a language of compression and fragmentation.

The bull motif, first painted in 1956 and revisited in his final works before his death in 2009, serves as a compelling throughline: sketched obsessively at the Bandra abattoir, it embodies the convergence of personal memory and collective trauma, plasticity and power, containment and freedom.

Similarly, the Falling Figure and Falling Bird series suspend bodies in mid-descent, evoking weightlessness amid collapse, while mythological subjects like Kali and Mahishasura, reimagined after Mehta’s Santiniketan residency, confront viewers with raw power and visceral distortion.

The inclusion of Koodal, with its non-linear montage of abattoirs, rituals, and everyday encounters set to Carnatic music, extends these concerns into cinematic form, demonstrating Mehta’s early immersion in image-making and his lifelong fascination with existential cycles.

Archival elements such notebooks, letters, photographs, and annotated books, add intellectual depth, illuminate Mehta’s rigorous draughtsmanship and the ecosystem of support among peers. These materials reveal a chronicler of visual thinking, whose lines, increasingly sparse and charged, open spaces for encounters with vulnerability and endurance.

The exhibition’s installation, with its focused groupings of series and media, allows viewers to trace these lifelong preoccupations, connecting the relevance of Mehta’s practice to present-day asymmetries and violence.

Yet, for all its strengths, the exhibition occasionally sacrifices conceptual rigour for evocative phrasing. The narrative’s invocation of Mehta’s “embrace of duality” and “paradoxical nature of reality” gestures toward the existential tensions in his work: figures trapped between action and inaction, hope and despair, but remains underdeveloped.

Such terms, while poetic, demand more precise unpacking: how exactly did Mehta’s pictorial devices (the diagonal’s rupture, the diagonal’s conjoining of fragments) articulate these paradoxes in relation to specific historical or philosophical contexts? The brevity here risks reducing complex visual strategies to broad existentialism, limiting the exhibition’s analytical purchase.

More conspicuously, the exhibition underplays Mehta’s embeddedness in the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. While his association with MF Husain, SH Raza, and others is noted in passing, the show rarely details how this collective search for a foundational modernist language in newly independent India shaped Mehta’s formal innovations.

The Progressives’ rejection of revivalism and their engagement with international modernism: evident in Mehta’s encounters with Francis Bacon and Barnett Newman, are acknowledged but not interrogated as significant forces. This omission quite flattens the relationality of post-colonial Indian art, presenting Mehta’s distilled idiom as a solitary achievement rather than a dialogic outcome within a fertile milieu.

Archishman Sarker is an art historian. He teaches at Ashoka University.

Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (With the Lightness of Being) is on view At the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Saket, New Delhi until June 30.