Tyeb Mehta is one of the celebrated painters from India who has achieved recognition at international level.

 Tyeb Mehta has always attracted elite investors. The artist’s works have seen a spurt in value over the years. For instance, at Saffronart’s 2007 Summer Online Auction his Kali, a 1969 oil on canvas, estimated at $875,000-1,125,000/Rs 35,000,000-45,000,000 sold for $987,500/Rs 39,500,00.

Over the past decade or so, Tyeb Mehta’s works in international auctions have always attracted a coveted cover price. His ‘Mahishasura’ has set new records at international art auctions.

His large oeuvre that spans well over six decades has clearly established Tyeb Mehta as one of the most noteworthy names of modern Indian art. The celebrated veteran artist has so far represented India in many prestigious international exhibitions with his masterpieces like ‘Kali’, ‘Trussed bull on Rickshaw’ and ‘Falling Figures’.

Among his other must-mention works are ‘Shantiniketan Triptych’, which was painted about two decades ago. It’s a 3-paneled portrait of distortion and of self-awareness, necessitated by exclusivist self-identities - individual as well as collective.

Tyeb Mehta has received several prestigious awards like ‘Lalit Kala Akademi award’ (1965) and the ‘Kalidasa Samman’ (1988). His work has been showcased at the Festival Internationale de la Peinture, Menton Biennale, and Cagnes-sur-Mer (1974) where it won the Prix Nationale.

Tyeb Mehta’s paintings create an ethos of brooding, somber consciousness. They raise some unanswered rather unanswerable queries s about the human condition. Explaining the thought-processes as an artist, he has been quoted as saying: “When you are young, you make an attempt to understand the world. As you start getting old you try to understand yourself and your work then becomes the essence of these efforts.”

The artist has once stated that his work has been influenced by European painters including Francis Bacon, Paul Klee and Barnett Newman. Known for his unique style, the personal life story of this renowned artist has been full of several dramatic moments which have been recounted vividly in one of the books on him.

The artist actually was keen on becoming a filmmaker. As he has revealed in an interview: “I was very much interested in the visual medium. Then I was fortunate enough to be groomed by my teacher and several of my friends among whom there was Raza, Souza, Husain, Ara, Kishen Khanna, etc. They would invariably talk about post-Independence and the necessity to find a new language divorced from Western sensibilities.”

The artist has went through various ups and downs in his life and has been a witness to many human tragedies, such as the Partition of India that led to the Hindu-Muslim violent clashes of 1947. This catastrophic violence and the subsequent churning of emotions it provoked left a deep mark on his art. “That spate of violence gave me the clue about the emotion I wish ant to paint,” he has once remarked. “That violence has got stuck into my mind.”

His career has invariably mirrored the changing trends and fortunes of contemporary Indian art over the last more than six decades. As it has been mentioned in a feature on him in the NYT, the artist has seen it all, from the intellectual fervor of its birth at Indian independence in 1947, to a lifetime of aesthetic and financial struggle, to the improbable rise of the Indian art market.