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Lot Essay
In 1962, Krishen Khanna became the first Indian artist to receive a traveling fellowship from the John D. Rockefeller III Council of Economics and Cultural Affairs, later known as the JDR III Fund. This fellowship sponsored his travel to the United States via the Far East, where he made stops in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Japan. It was in Japan that Khanna encountered and became intrigued by the ancient art of sumi-e (or suiboku-ga), a monochromatic ink painting tradition practiced by Zen Buddhists for several centuries. Emphasizing calligraphy and spontaneity while stripping away extraneous detail, this technique welcomed the unpredictable, allowing for serendipitous artistic outcomes, as Khanna admiringly described it.
When he reached New York, Khanna took a room at the Chelsea Hotel and used its bathroom as a studio to experiment with and expand on this approach, first trying it out with black ink on handmade rice paper and then with oil paint on canvas. Influenced by the work of Abstract Expressionist artists he encountered in the United States, Khanna continued this series of paintings equally inspired by Eastern and Western artistic traditions for a short period after returning to India. The present lot is a significant example from the limited series of paintings from this phase of the artist's oeuvre, incorporating the stylistic essence of sumi-e while embodying the spirit of Abstract Expressionism through a composition of shifting forms and layered shadows.
In 1965, on another trip to America, Khanna exhibited a group of these largely monochromatic works at Charles Egan Gallery in New York, noted for giving artists like Willem de Kooning and Joseph Cornell their first solo shows and exhibiting the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, Philip Guston and Isamu Noguchi among others. Reviewing the show, the critic Stuart Preston wrote that in these works, "The medium appears to leave the artist's control and perform formal dances on its own" (G. Sinha, Krishen Khanna, A Critical Biography, New Delhi, 2001, p. 89). Works from this series are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Menil Collection, Houston.
When he reached New York, Khanna took a room at the Chelsea Hotel and used its bathroom as a studio to experiment with and expand on this approach, first trying it out with black ink on handmade rice paper and then with oil paint on canvas. Influenced by the work of Abstract Expressionist artists he encountered in the United States, Khanna continued this series of paintings equally inspired by Eastern and Western artistic traditions for a short period after returning to India. The present lot is a significant example from the limited series of paintings from this phase of the artist's oeuvre, incorporating the stylistic essence of sumi-e while embodying the spirit of Abstract Expressionism through a composition of shifting forms and layered shadows.
In 1965, on another trip to America, Khanna exhibited a group of these largely monochromatic works at Charles Egan Gallery in New York, noted for giving artists like Willem de Kooning and Joseph Cornell their first solo shows and exhibiting the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, Philip Guston and Isamu Noguchi among others. Reviewing the show, the critic Stuart Preston wrote that in these works, "The medium appears to leave the artist's control and perform formal dances on its own" (G. Sinha, Krishen Khanna, A Critical Biography, New Delhi, 2001, p. 89). Works from this series are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Menil Collection, Houston.