As part of his first trade monograph, these paintings of London-based
artist Matthew Krishanu (b.1980, Bradford) explore subjects such as
childhood, race, religion, art history, family, grief, and love.
Matthew Krishanu's paintings explore topics including childhood, race,
religion, art history, family, grief, and love. His subjects -
frequently Brown people, especially children - are realized with a
shallow pictorial depth, delicate washes of color, and with a sense of
interior life. Through this, Krishanu questions the positions of his
painterly subjects and depictions of landscapes in relation to the
legacy of European colonialism and the art historical canon. Krishanu's
practice is heavily informed by his early childhood spent in Dhaka where
his parents moved in order to work for the Church of Bangladesh.
This, his first trade monograph, presents a number of series of
Krishanu's works: Another Country, Expatriates, Mission, House of God,
Religious Workers and In Sickness and In Health. The paintings included
have been made in oil and/or acrylic on canvas, linen or board, with the
earliest produced in 2007 and most recent completed in 2022.
The publication features essays by Mark Rappolt and Dorothy Price,
alongside an interview with the artist by Ben Luke. Rappolt,
Editor-in-Chief at ArtReview magazine, details the various worlds
present within Krishanu's paintings. He draws out key themes within
Krishanu's oeuvre such as power, religion, identity, and memory, while
highlighting its distance from didacticism, and at times, its carefully
constructed ambivalence, through examination of key works such as
Mission School (2017), Mountain Tent (Two Boys) (2020) and Playground
(2020). Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual
Culture at The Courtauld, writes sensitively about solitude, memory, and
emotion which are palpable within Krishanu's work. In particular, the
series In Sickness and In Health, which traces a life path of Uschi
Gatward, the artist's late wife, over sixteen years to her untimely
death from cancer in late 2021. The series is foregrounded as a
significant and intimate body of work that subtly shifts over the time
period it depicts. In a new interview with Luke, a critic and editor at
The Art Newspaper, Krishanu discusses his practice in relation to ideas
of religion, race, global art history, photography, health, and personal
experiences. Krishanu's work explores, in the artist's own words, 'the
puzzle of painting'.
The publication has been edited by Georgia Griffiths and Matt Price. It
has been designed by Joe Gilmore, printed and bound by EBS, Verona, and
produced by Anomie Publishing and Niru Ratnam, London. The publication
has been supported by Guy Halamish; Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai; Niru
Ratnam, London; Taimur Hassan; and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los
Angeles.
