Krishen Khanna

Krishen Khanna, who turned one hundred in 2025, is the last living member of the Progressive Artists’ Group—a painter and sculptor who has spent seven decades insisting on the human figure, on “human beings caught up in their particular condition.”

Born in 1925 in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad, Pakistan) and raised in Lahore, Khanna is largely self-taught. He studied at the Imperial Service College, Windsor, took his BA Honours at Government College, Lahore, and attended evening classes at the Mayo School of Art. The Partition of 1947 uprooted his family to Shimla, an experience that became the formative subject of his early work. A position with Grindlays Bank brought him to Bombay, where he was invited into the Progressive Artists’ Group; he first exhibited with them in 1949, and soon left banking for painting altogether.

While his contemporaries pursued abstraction, Khanna remained resolutely figurative—narrative in impulse, expressionist in handling. His recurring subjects—bandwallahs in their brass-buttoned uniforms, truck-loaders, scenes drawn from Christian iconography—dignify lives lived at the margins. In recent years the bandwallahs have stepped off the canvas into patinated bronze and monumental resinated fibreglass, extending his lifelong subject into sculpture.

His first solo exhibition was held at USIS, Chennai, in 1955; he was artist-in-residence at the American University, Washington D.C., in 1964, and received a Rockefeller fellowship in 1965. A major retrospective was mounted by Saffronart at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, in 2010, and Krishen Khanna at 100: The Last Progressive opened at NGMA Mumbai in November 2025. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1990, the Lalit Kala Ratna in 2004, and the Padma Bhushan in 2011. He lives and works in New Delhi.