Matthew Krishanu (b.1980, Bradford, UK) paints atmospheric, pared-back compositions including scenes from the artist’s life, particularly his childhood years in Bangladesh growing up with his brother, and their parents who were Christian missionaries. In the paintings, seemingly familiar narratives are alluded to but destabilised. The viewer’s own projections are called upon to fulfil the interpretive loop, raising questions about childhood, religion, race, power, and the legacies of empire.
These personal stories are told through layers of memory, imagination, and conversations with the history of painting. Drawing on multiple influences including El Greco, Gwen John, Noah Davis, and the Ajanta cave paintings, Krishanu’s work often explores how representations in the canon of Western art have shaped our collective unconscious around questions of race and gender. Working in ongoing series that include Another Country, Mission, and Holy Family, one painting segues into the next as a natural telling of the artist’s own journey through the joys and sorrows of life, with deeply personal subject matter that speaks to the human condition in all its complexity.
The exhibition’s title, The Bough Breaks, proceeds from the artist’s recent exhibition On a Limb (Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, 2023). Both exhibitions relate to images from Krishanu’s Two Boys series, in which the artist and his brother are depicted perched on, and to some extent dwarfed by, the majestic branches, or ‘limbs’, of the banyan tree—an iconic symbol in Indian culture. The potential failure of this security—if the bough was to break—alludes to the dark undertones of the nursery rhyme Rock-a-bye Baby, as well as to the evident failure of the structures that should protect, provide for, and perpetuate society: a poignant metaphor for contemporary life.
Krishanu’s practice is at once an exploration of subject and medium, where by deeply personal subject matter is a means of approaching his primary, painterly concerns. The compositions provide multiple entry points—at times holding the viewer at bay and, at others, inviting them in. Meaning is implied rather than dictated, barring the path to reductive biographical readings.
Just as the paintings offer an immersion in surfaces, this major showcase of primarily new work by the artist will also foreground Krishanu’s drawings and works on paper—what he describes as the generative heartbeat of the exhibition.
A new essay by British broadcaster and journalist Bidisha Mamata will be published as the latest edition of Camden Art Centre’s File Note series.
