Important Notice

Tyeb Mehta's art was focussed on subjects that referred to the complexities and dilemmas of the human condition. From his iconic "falling figure" to the trussed bull, Mehta explored a concise repertoire of subjects through an artistic career marked by quiet intensity. Whether the figures were human, animal or bird, they conveyed - at times even screamed - a sense of disquieting torment and trauma. These figures in crisis are at once, fantastical... Tyeb Mehta's art was focussed on subjects that referred to the complexities and dilemmas of the human condition. From his iconic "falling figure" to the trussed bull, Mehta explored a concise repertoire of subjects through an artistic career marked by quiet intensity. Whether the figures were human, animal or bird, they conveyed - at times even screamed - a sense of disquieting torment and trauma. These figures in crisis are at once, fantastical and earth-bound: unforgiving goddesses fighting demons to the death, rickshaw-pullers, trussed bulls, and birds and humans hurtling through the void.

The present lot, a human and bird companion in free fall, has its roots in Mehta's Falling Figure series, which he first began painting in the mid-sixties. By the late-1980s, Mehta had begun morphing the falling figure with that of a bird, a flurry of limbs and feathers, merging into a strange, composite creature. Over the following decade, the falling bird began to take centre stage. Mehta elaborates, "I did the first drawing of the bird as far back as 1983 but as I went along I generally began to feel that the bird always flies so why not make it fall - it's a contradiction in terms. The bird can be made without bringing in flying because that has a different kind of body-lifting movement. Falling means you have more or less given up. It's an interesting idea because I work on fragmentation. It's one of my preoccupations." (Artist quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 25)

Perhaps referencing the mythologies of Icarus and Jatayu, or invoking the literature of Camus, because Mehta was a well-read artist, the painting presents a worldview wrought with myths and juxtaposition, with hints of the absurd. Mehta's son, Yusuf points out that the artist worked with oxymorons. The powerful bull in his paintings was trussed, the bird who ought to have spread his wings to fly was instead, tumbling down like a rock. Describing the present lot, Dalmia writes: "...the bone-white bird sinks downwards its feathers echoing dismembered hands separated by a calm blue sky, clutching itself, as it seems to fall upon us. The gruesome falling act, made even more surreal by the placid nature of its backdrop, heightens the act of cruelty inherent in the painting, and thus in nature." (Dalmia, p. 25)

"Is this an image of a man and bird wrestling in contorted embrace, all the way down their spiralling fall? What bird is this, lost in fall, toppling, shockingly falling at and even on top of us through a shift of gaze: its feathers form a dismembered hand, clutching at feathers, cut by a blue plane of sky." (Ranjit Hoskote, Ramchandra Gandhi et al., Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 42) Mehta dissects the austere background into four cleanly defined colour planes, which intersect to further splinter the falling creature. Unlike the chaotic abyss of his earliest Falling Figure, the present lot reflects influences of the Colour Field paintings of American abstractionists which Mehta encountered during his Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship in New York in 1968. In particular, it was Barnett Newman, whose "monochromatic fields of color and strong vertical dividing lines proved critical for Mehta's own pictorial vocabulary." (Edward Saywell, Bharat Ratna! Jewels of Modern Indian Art, Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2009-10, p. 11)

This painting is striking for its minimalism and restraint. By creating its own enigmatic narrative, it takes its place alongside some of the most iconic Mehta works that are much sought after by connoisseurs and collectors.

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