For more than seventy years, Krishen Khanna has painted people in the middle of things: a band on the march, a crowd reading the news, a wedding passing in the street. In these digital works they are set in motion. Krishen worked side by side with the NewArtX team as the films were made, guiding how each figure moves.
Every film grows from one of his own paintings or sculptures and carries his signature. What the films add is time: the procession passes, the newspapers stir, and the music begins.
Each work is shown here in excerpt; to see one in full, please enquire.
A digital artwork by Krishen Khanna, brought to life from the canvas to the screen. It offers a glimpse into a wedding procession, featuring his iconic bandwallas.
The film is drawn from a painting of his in five panels. A boy in yellow rides high on a white horse, the band in white and red plays on, and the guests crowd in on every side.
A crowd stands shoulder to shoulder over open newspapers, every face bent to the same news. The painting behind the film is Evening News (2005), a return to the newspaper readers of News of Gandhiji’s Death, which Krishen painted in 1948.
A full band in scarlet marches beneath bare trees on a blue ground, trumpets raised, drums and tubas close behind. The film comes from one of his paintings of the bandwallas, the brass-band players Krishen first painted in the 1970s, after a wedding procession blocked his car as he drove out of his Delhi studio. He recognised them at once: as a schoolboy in England he had played in a band himself.
Five bandsmen sit and play before a stairway of warm stone: a trumpet, two tubas and two accordions. They are the monumental bandwalla sculptures of Larger Than Life, Krishen’s public art initiative, which takes his work beyond galleries and museums so that everyone can share in it.
