The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is set to unveil Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (With the Lightness of Being), a landmark retrospective celebrating the birth centenary of one of India’s most influential modernists. The exhibition, opening for preview on February 4, 2026, and on view from February 5 to June 30, 2026, is presented in collaboration with the Tyeb Mehta Foundation and Saffronart Foundation, and curated by KNMA’s Artistic Director and Chief Curator, Roobina Karode.
Spanning over 120 works, the exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of Mehta’s oeuvre to date: encompassing paintings, drawings, sculptures, film, and archival materials that trace his five-decade-long engagement with form, myth, and modernity. Building upon a prelude shown at Art Mumbai 2025, this full-scale Delhi edition offers audiences an intimate view into Mehta’s evolving visual vocabulary, intellectual depth, and his lifelong negotiation between violence and transcendence.
“His unique and inimitable language in painting has elegantly addressed the contradictory forces of life and arrived at a vocabulary distinctly his own, yet to be seen in its depth and breadth,” said Kiran Nadar, Founder and Chairperson of KNMA.
The exhibition foregrounds iconic series including Falling Figure, Mahishasura, Kali, Bull, and the Diagonal, each a testament to Mehta’s probing of existential tension and the human form under strain. The recurring image of the bull, first drawn at Mumbai’s Bandra abattoir in the 1950s and revisited until his final painting in 2007 anchors Mehta’s reflections on power, sacrifice, and survival.
A highlight of the retrospective is Mehta’s 16-minute short film Koodal (1970), produced by the Films Division of India and recipient of the Filmfare Critics Award. Shot in stark black and white, the film uses symbolic juxtapositions of human and divine imagery to meditate on life, death, and cyclical existence.
In addition to major canvases, Bearing Weight features notebooks, letters, photographs, and exhibition material offering a rare glimpse into the artist’s process and personal world. “This exhibition foregrounds the multidimensionality of Mehta’s creative process and the context of its emergence,” said curator Roobina Karode. “It extends KNMA’s commitment to revisiting narratives of modernism in Indian and South Asian art.”
Born in 1925 in Kapadvanj, Gujarat, Tyeb Mehta began his career in film editing before graduating from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, in 1952. He was associated with the Progressive Artists’ Group and later lived in London and New York, where his visual language, marked by the introduction of the diagonal took shape. Over the decades, Mehta’s canvases became metaphors for struggle and resilience, earning him national and international acclaim, including the Padma Bhushan in 2007.
Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (With the Lightness of Being) will be on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Saket, from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., until June 30, 2026.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
