About Krishen Khanna
Krishen Khanna, born in 1925 in Faisalabad (now in Pakistan), is a renowned Indian painter known for his figurative artworks that depict everyday street scenes with emotional depth. He primarily works with oils on vibrant backgrounds, using bold colors and expressive brushstrokes to create compositions that convey the energy and struggles of ordinary life. Khanna’s art often portrays marginalized communities, such as band musicians, street vendors, and migrant laborers. Inspired by southern Indian fisher folk, his work later became more abstract and introspective.
The Partition of India in 1947 deeply influenced Khanna’s early art, as he captured the chaos and personal upheaval of that time. While many of his contemporaries explored abstraction, Khanna focused on figurative art to emphasize the human experience and the impact of social conditions. His use of vivid colors and dynamic textures adds life to his work, which captures everyday scenes with a narrative quality.
Khanna’s inspirations range from Hindu mythology to New Testament stories. He portrayed Jesus as an ordinary human, emphasizing raw emotions rather than idealized depictions. His time visiting the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war battlefields also brought themes of violence and human suffering into his work.
A largely self-taught artist, Khanna attended evening classes at the Mayo School of Art in Lahore. After moving to Shimla post-Partition, he took up a job at Grindlays Bank in Bombay and joined the Progressive Artists' Group, exhibiting with them in 1949. His first solo show was held at the USIS in Chennai in 1955. Since then, he has showcased his work widely in India and abroad, including prominent solo exhibitions such as Krishen Khanna: A Retrospective (2010) and When the Band Begins to Play... (2015).
Krishen Khanna has received many prestigious awards, including the Padma Shri in 1990 and the Padma Bhushan in 2011, for his contributions to Indian art. He was the first Indian artist to win a fellowship from the Council for Economic and Cultural Affairs and served as an artist-in-residence at American University in Washington D.C. in 1964.
Through his career, Khanna’s art has remained rooted in human stories, brought to life with vibrant colors and evocative brushwork. He currently lives and works in New Delhi.