Krishen Khanna (b. 1925)

"India: Contemporary Art from a Northeastern Private collects ion", Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Jersey, April 7--July 31, 2002

Good overall condition. Some yellowing to whitish pigment, consistent with age.
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Krishen Khanna’s large 1961 work, A Graph of Pleasure and Pain, was shown at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University in 2002. Curated by Jeffrey Weshler and containing more than 100 paintings, drawings and sculpture, ''India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private collects ions'' was a groundbreaking exhibition—to this day, it is still the most extensive American museum survey of modern Indian art. In the words of noted New York t.mes s art critic Holland Cotter, the Zimmerli exhibition constituted “a substantial contribution to our knowledge of contemporary Asian culture with an important survey of post-independence Indian painting,” (Cotter, “In New Jersey, Art From Asia On a Comfortably Human Scale”, The New York t.mes s, July 26, 2002). 

By the late 1950s, abstract expressionist elements appear in Krishen Khanna’s largely figurative canvases. In the current work, from 1961, the figurative or landscape elements have disappeared entirely, and Khanna’s staccato brushwork manifests as an abstracted series of mathematical sine waves. Gayatri Sinha explains: “Krishen’s involvement with abstract expressionism was immediate and served as an extension to his passion for poetry. A Graph of Pleasure and Pain [is] given a similar treatment. Almost completely monochromatic, a strong dynamic center is evolved in the painting through the interplay of line and color.

“Even in his broadly figurative work of later years, this kind of interest in pigment surfaced repeatedly … In a number of paintings, a dominant brushstroke usually in vivid red, black or white appears like abstract calligraphy. The effect is of an internal rhythm and intense movement, both horizontally and vertically. It is from these images, which continue till 1967, that his figurative works emerge,” (Sinha, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, Delhi, 2001, pp. 57, 81).