Krishen Khanna’s works range from carefully
constructed compositions to gestural, spontaneous works. His deployment of
colour and strokes to evoke the human situation is unmatched. Works like his
Nocturne series capture the heaviness of a worker’s tired body resting at the
end of the day as faithfully as his Bandwallas series captures the exuberant
energy of the band of musicians.
In
his many monochromatic works one sees the energy in the frenzy of lines and
tension in the tight compositions, with the overall picture pulsating with the
interplay of formal elements. Through a lack of physical detail; Khanna’s
paintings aspire towards a quality of timelessness and universality. As an
artist he defies categorisation as he simultaneously occupies multiple roles –
as a narrator, as a formalist, a genre painter.
He has worked on themes ranging from everyday domestic scenes to moments of historical importance, from scenes from myths and poetry to quite portraits of people from his life. He has continually worked with the contrasts between the mundane and the sublime, the ordinary and the epic dimension. Constantly oscillating between the banal and the spectacular, for Khanna’s the personal is the political and political personal.
