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Saffronart | Evening Sale
PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN, NEW DELHI
40
KRISHEN KHANNA
(b. 1925)
Emmaus
Signed and inscribed ‘K Khanna / KRISHEN
KHANNA / “EMMAUS”’ (on the reverse)
2006
Oil on canvas
71.5 x 51.5 in (181.5 x 130.7 cm)
Rs 70,00,000 ‒ 90,00,000
$ 106,065 ‒ 136,365
PROVENANCE:
Acquired directly from the artist
EXHIBITED:
Krishen Khanna
, London: Saffronart in
association with Osborne Samuel and Berkeley
Square Gallery, 19‒24 March 2007
Krishen Khanna: A RETROSPECTIVE
, New Delhi:
Saffronart, 23 January ‒ 5 February 2010
PUBLISHED:
Norbert Lynton, Gayatri Sinha and Ranjit
Hoskote eds.,
Krishen Khanna: Images in My
Time
, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd.,
2007, pp. 127, 136‒137 (illustrated)
Krishen Khanna’s art focuses on the human figure. The subject
is often that of the subaltern: a term used by postcolonial critic
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to denote a class of people that were
“ostracised, hapless victims of society.” (Gayatri Sinha,
Krishen
Khanna: A Critical Biography
, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery,
2001, p. 98) Within this context and beyond, Khanna is concerned
with the individual and his particular condition in society. Band
musicians, waiters at roadside tea‒stalls or
dhabas
,
and
labourers
sleeping beneath trucks – subjects who are otherwise overlooked
– gain dignity in his works.
Emmaus
is situated towards the end of Khanna’s series of Christ
paintings, which began in the late 1960s. They were often allegorical,
in Khanna’s vocabulary, for the political turmoil that emerged during
the Emergency in India in the 1970s. “Through a lack of physical
detail, the paintings aspire towards a quality of timelessness...
Khanna is probably the first painter of the unromanticised subaltern
who does not lend it the redeeming rhythms of his contemporary
Husain or else the abstracted spaces and forms of Tyeb Mehta. The
manacled Christ... or the roughmen supping with Christ at Emmaus
show a kinship with his exhausted labourers sleeping beneath their
dusty trucks.” (Gayatri Sinha,
Krishen Khanna: The Embrace of Love
,
Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 2005, p. 17)
Krishen Khanna
© Jyoti Bhatt
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