TYEB MEHTA is the first comprehensive book devoted to the artist’s practice since his death in 2009, and the most complete account of his work yet assembled in one volume. One of the defining painters of India’s first post-colonial generation, Mehta spent five decades distilling the upheavals he witnessed – Partition, displacement, and the daily asymmetries of life in a new nation – into a visual language of extraordinary economy, through recurring motifs: the bull, the falling figure, the falling bird, the diagonal, and his reimaginings of Kali and Mahishasura.

Growing out of a landmark retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, this volume co-published along with the KNMA traces that language across every medium Mehta worked in – painting, drawing, sculpture, and his rarely seen 1970 film Koodal – with forewords, a curatorial note, and a suite of essays that range from sweeping accounts of his practice to closer readings of particular works and mediums within it. TYEB MEHTA is the definitive record of an artist who turned a fractured century into form.

Edited by Roobina Karode and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, with essays by Roobina Karode, Ashok Vajpeyi, Gieve Patel, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi and Aditi Ghildiyal
Publisher: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Mapin Publishing
Pages: 240
ISBN: 978-81-983821-4-6