Important Notice

Krishen Khanna was born in 1925 in what is now Faisalabad in Pakistan, and grew up in Lahore. In 1947, he and his family were forced to flee their home for the Indian border just a few days before the Partition. These experiences as a refugee left an indelible mark on Khanna and gave rise to a lifelong kinship and empathy with migrant families.

Krishan Khanna’s observations of life around him are central to his artistic oeuvre. The... Krishen Khanna was born in 1925 in what is now Faisalabad in Pakistan, and grew up in Lahore. In 1947, he and his family were forced to flee their home for the Indian border just a few days before the Partition. These experiences as a refugee left an indelible mark on Khanna and gave rise to a lifelong kinship and empathy with migrant families.

Krishan Khanna’s observations of life around him are central to his artistic oeuvre. The marginalised figure, who has been robbed of the benefits of a modernising state, has been an enduring subject in his work for over five decades. The artist’s works “reveal a persistence of vision. Despite a certain levity, they persist with a reading of the dispossessed who do not share in the country’s-and specifically in the city of Delhi’s-new buoyant self-image.” (Gayathri Sinha, “O.K. TATA,” Contemporary Indian Artists Series: Krishen Khanna - Images in My Time, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2007, p. 80)

During the 1970s, he began capturing the scenes he observed in the bylanes of Bhogal, a refugee settlement in Delhi dominated by traders and migrants from West Punjab. His preoccupation with the subaltern gave rise to Rear View, a series of works that documented the lives of migrant labourers who arrived in the city, which was then expanding into a metropolis, seeking employment.

As seen in the present lot, Khanna captures moments in time and transfers his observations onto the canvas with spontaneity, keeping the representational elements of his subjects intact. He elevates the mundane through the use of colour and expressionist brushwork. Through the lack of detail, the painting acquires a sense of timelessness. “As time went on my structure loosened, the image would become nebulous, almost disappear, then reappear as if I were conjuring up a ghost,” he remarked. (Gayathri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2001, p. 116) The figures are barely distinguishable from the truck, alluding to their invisibility in a city that they helped build, an act of social and historical erasure. In these subjects, Khanna recalls his own sense of displacement that he felt as a refugee of the Partition. “Their state of rootlessness and overcrowding on the rough city streets is emphasized in their animal-like forward backward placement in the truck.” (Sinha, 2001, p. 119) Khanna further observes, “The wheels and tyres of this monster are brushed violently as is the ground on which they rotate creating an uneasy sense of instability or rush.” (Sinha, 2007, p. 81)

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