Bombay, India

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 Film fare 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. Apart from several solo exhibitions Mehta has participated in international shows like Ten Contemporary Indian Painters at Trenton in the U.S. in 1965; Deuxieme Biennial Internationale de Menton, 1974; Festival Intemationale de la Peinture, Cagnes- -Sur-Mer, France 1974; Modem Indian Paintings at Hirschhom Museum, Washington 1982, and Seven Indian Painters at Gallerie Le Monde de U art, Paris 1994. He was awarded the Kalidas Samman by the Madhya Pradesh Government in 1988. 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 modern.

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