In 1967, F.N. Souza emigrated to America from London and began a new phase of painting that departed radically from his previous styles of the 50s and 60s. In England, Souza's works, particularly those of the 50s, absorbed the trends emerging in British architecture and sculpture.  One of the greatest strengths of Souza's work is that he remained tirelessly experimental.  The bold complex heads of the 1950s created with thick cross hatching become further distorted in the early 1960s to result in complex mutated forms. The artist states 'I have created a new kind of face...I have drawn the physiognomy way beyond Picasso, in completely new terms.  And I am still a figurative painter...He stumped them and the whole of the western world into a shambles.  When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further.'  (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 94). 

In America he found everything to be larger than life. He commented on the size of American supermarkets, calling their counterparts in Europe no better than beggars' larders. He admired the vaulting architecture of Manhattan's skyscrapers and embraced America's obsession with✤ being "the b✱iggest and the best" with a ferocious glee that found voice in his paintings over the ten years. The American philosophy of "bigger and better" matched his personality and appetite. Even if the paintings themselves were small in size, the message in them was not.

About his heads he wrote: 'After Picasso, most artists chickened out and went 'abstract,' not daring to go further than him as he had from Cezanne to Cubism and taken the 'distortions' of Van Gogh and Gauguin several moves away.... In my paintings of the human head I have gone beyond Picasso.'

In "Mutation" we see Souza's ability to manifest one of the many worlds that populated his imagination. When asked why he painted heads with multiple features he replied, because he could. From his imagination he could create anything including faces with more than one nose or pair of eyes. He wasn't striving for his art to mimic life, nor to represent it. His refusal to conform to the popular art movements of the time, in particular, the Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art that were the rage in America at the time, put Souza's w🅠ork during this period out of favour. Yet by standing his own ground his art retained its integrity. And in hindsight what emerges is consistent style despite his numerous reinventions of himself that is iconically, uniquely Souza. (Shelley Souza, 2007).