Provenance - Collection of a reputed art gallery, New Delhi. Acquired from Astaguru auction, June 2022.

Krishen Khanna is a popular Indian artist born in 1925 at Lyallpur, Faislabad, in Pakistan. He studied at the Imperial Service College in England and is a selftaught artist. He received the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1962 and was awarded Padma Shri in 1990, and Padma Bhushan in 2011. Khanna pursued his banking career in 1950 at Chennai and other areas that played a symbolic role in his life where he lived with his family. 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, the Garden of Gethsemane and gradually culminated in Betrayal, Christ’s Descent from Cross, Pieta and Emmaus. His figurative sketches, very subtly encapsulate 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 Gurgaon.