Krishen Khanna is a popular Indian artist born in 1925 at Lyallpur, now Faislabad, in pre-Independence India. He studied at the Imperial Service College in England and is a self-taught artist. He received the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1962 and was awarded the Padma Shri in 1990, and the Padma Bhushan in 2011.

Krishen pursued his banking career in the 1950 at the Madras and other areas that played a symbolic role in his life where he lived with his family of young children. Interestingly, his growing fondness for Indian classical music and the surroundings where he lived gradually became 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 the late 1960s, he engaged in a series of paintings on Christ, The Last Supper, and the Garden of Gethsemane and gradually culminated in Betrayal, Christ’s Descent from Cross, Pieta and Emmaus.

His figurative sketches, very subtly encapsulates its subject and the emotion of the whole composition. These rough drafts on paper go further into the creation of these magnificent canvases documenting colors and the day to day routines of communities. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.