Biography
Krishen Khanna, a genre painter and a narrativist who weaves and spins images out of the fragments of time
was born on the year 1925 at Lyallpur, now Faislabad in Pakistan. His art practice is embedded in the
unfoldment of his own life experiences. With his colleagues, he belongs to the generation that experienced
painting and independence, painting for independence and painting from a position of independence. In a
paradox, his art springs from the observation of life lived around himself but it is not an intimate act of
confession or self examination. In this way, Khanna is central to his own practice as mediator and interpreter
but never as a subject. He assumes the position of the ‘katha vachak’ or narrator, looking outward to the other
rather than the self. The central image then is of the artist as commentator, who through painted gesture and
narrative seems to set up threads of connectivity. To all families, like his own which suffered the ravages of
the Partition, the accumulation of family and community narratives, of loss and survival became like a bank of
stories, shared and adapted over the years. It was partition that drove the first wedge of displacement and
deep anxiety into everyday experience of many young Indians growing in the Punjab but for Krishen, the
actual sense of displacement came much earlier during his schooling in England at the Imperial Services
College. When war broke out, shelling and air raids became a part of the student’s experience. He returned
to Sultan and then joined the Government College at Lahore where he studied English literature. The
violent displacement from their home was compounded with Krishen’s need to seek work. He befriended the
artists who made up the core of the Progressive Artists Group - Husain, Souza and Raza with his
appointment at the Grindlays Bank. From the late 1940’s, he began to exhibit his work at the Bombay Art
Society and exhibited with the Progressives at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1951 following his invitation to
their show in 1949. Krishen’s banking career that spanned the decade of the 1950s at the Madras and Kapur
represents another idyllic period of a family of young children, and his growing fascination for Indian classical
music, which he introduced as a subject in his paintings. He also did several paintings on the subjects of
death and displacement and revealed the first indication to paint subjects from myth and history. In a critical
decision to become a full-time painter and to abandon his career as a banker, he came to Delhi in the early
1960s with a family of three small children and his wife Renu and lived for several years with his parents.
Krishen’s introduction to allegory and religious symbolism is buried in a childhood memory. When his father
returned from his doctoral studies in England in 1932, he brought with him a copy of Da Vinci’s The Last
Supper which he keenly studied. He spent summer holidays at the vicarage of the Franciscan Brother,
Joseph Gardener who reinforced his readings of the Bible. This gentle figure is what inspired his first
painting of St. Francis, a recurring subject in his painting.From the late 1960s, he engaged in a series of
paintings on Christ that start with The Last Supper, and Garden at Gethsemane and gradually culminate in
Betrayal, Christ’s Descent from Cross, Pieta and Emmaus. The series gains significance not only because of
its appearance during the emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi but because of the kinship it shares with
Krishen’s other work of the 1970s.
He became an artist-in-residence at the American University, Washington DC. In 2010, a retrospective of his
work at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi was exhibited. His other solo exhibitions were held in London,
in 2005 and 2007; Mumbai 2004; New Delhi, 1994; and New Delhi, 2001, 1966, 64, 60, 59 and 58. His works
were also included in exhibitions in galleries in India and New York in 2001 and 2002.
In 2011, the Government of India awarded him with the Padma Bhushan; in 2004 he received the Lalit Kala
Ratna from the President of India; and in 1997 he received the Kala Ratna from the All India Fine Arts and
Crafts Society, New Delhi. Khanna lives and works in New Delhi.
Text Reference:
Excerpt from the book Krishen Khanna “The Embrace of Love" by Gayatri Sinha published by Mapin
Publishing on 2005