An artist who thought cinematically: What Tyeb Mehta’s drawings and sketches say about his art
· Scroll
Visit umafrika.club for more information.
For Tyeb Mehta, the line was never merely a formal device. It carried philosophical and emotional weight, embodying memory, myth, pain and redemption, with an intensity that was both provocative and contemplative. It is through his drawings that we trace the paradox at the heart of his practice: that the instability we perceive on his canvases was carefully engineered.
Mehta’s drawings have piqued visitors to the retrospective Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (with the lightness of being). Largely unseen for decades, they facilitate fresh curatorial perspectives on his visual language. We seldom see an artist’s preliminary exercises or the evolutionary charting of a creative practice. Such materials are often misplaced or lost after an artist’s death. Our access to the Tyeb Mehta Foundation’s archive, which has been preserved and catalogued with great care, allowed us to work backwards to the origins of tropes and motifs that recurred through his career.