Making of a Mural

Krishen Khanna

at Government Museum & Art Gallery Sector 10 C, Chandigarh, India
on Saturday, January 16, 2010, at 5.00 pm
Kindly take your seats by 4.45 pm, Use of mobile phones strictly prohibited

Books on Krishen Khanna, coffee-mugs, lamp-shades, mouse-pads, key-chains, plates, cushion-covers, neckties etc with images of Krishen Khanna art works' printed on them will be available on sale.

Krishen Khanna - one of the most significant artists responsible for shaping the modern art movement in the post independence India. He is one of the rare artists known for his quality of work, articulation, sobriety and command over the medium of painting as well as the written and spoken word.

About Krishen Khanna

Born in Lyallpur (now Faislabad, Pakistan), in pre partition India in 1925, Krishen Khanna moved to Shimla during the partition. In Lahore Khanna had attended evening classes at the Mayo School of Art. After arriving in India he took up a post with the Grindlays Bank and was placed in Mumbai. Once there Khanna was invited to join the Progressive Artists' Group with whom he remained in active association for the rest of his time. In Mumbai he held his first major exhibition and sold his first painting to Dr. Homi Bhabha for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

Khanna was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1962 and was Artist in Residence at the ameiican University in Washington in 1963-64. Apart from several one man shows he has participated in group shows like the Tokyo Biennale 1957 and 196 1, the Sao Paulo Biennale 1960, the Venice Biennale 1962, the Festival of India in the then USSR and in Japan in 1987 and 19 88. Khanna has held several important positions in decision-making bodies of the Lalit Kala Akademi, National Gallery of Modem Art and Roopanker Museum, Bhopal. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1996.

Making a gestural impact on the canvas Khanna's masterful deployment of paint to evoke the human situation is unmatched. The thick impasto surface often seems like a prism through which figures can be discerned as if in memory or in remote areas of childhood. Khanna lives and works in New Delhi.

Krishen's Preoccupation with the marching band

There is something sad and ridiculous about the band. A legacy from our erstwhile English rulers, whether official or military in pompous regalia, or shabbily costumed when accompanying middle-class marriage processions in the cities, the band is a macabre comment on bourgeois existence. While Krishen has dealt with this theme before, he has come back to it in his recent work.

From the series on the truck - the ramshackle juggernaut hurtling into space piled up with construction materials and brutalized labour, to the generals and politicians negotiating peace around the table with the skeleton of humanity lying under it, to Jesus and his betrayal, to the cacophonic irrelevance of the march-ing band, Krishen has been preoccu-pied in his work with the state and fate of man in our times. In a sense, his work is a graphic record, a visual documentation. What makes it art and lifts it out of the transient, are the abiding elements of the tragic, the sublime and the ridiculous -which are woven into it.

In his recent work, Krishen has unleashed himself into more sponta-neously expressionistic brush work and colour, eminently suited to the bedlam, the frenzied ritual of the incongruous band. In a phase in Indian painting when there is an epidemic of figuration in the name of humanistic considerations, Krishen's work has a persistent presence, free of any cult orientation. It is Krishen's primary commitment to his medium that brings relevance to his subject matter in art and lifts the mundane to the realm of the poignant.