Matthew Krishanu valuation
Paints a childhood in Bangladesh: two brothers in a banyan tree, mission churches and crows, from memory and old photographs.
Matthew Krishanu was born in Bradford in 1980 and spent much of his childhood in Bangladesh with his brother, where his parents, a British Christian missionary and an Indian theologian, worked for the church.
What a work by Matthew Krishanu is worth
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Bio
Matthew Krishanu was born in Bradford in 1980 and spent much of his childhood in Bangladesh with his brother, where his parents, a British Christian missionary and an Indian theologian, worked for the church. He studied fine art and English literature at the University of Exeter, graduating in 2001, and took an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2009. He paints from memory and from family photographs, editing and simplifying them into scenes left deliberately open: two boys in the branches of a tree, congregations and church interiors, schoolchildren, crows, river landscapes. His series carry titles such as Two Boys, Mission, Another Country and House of God, and the paintings bring questions of religion, race, power and the legacy of empire into an ordinary-looking childhood. In 2024 Camden Art Centre in London gave him The Bough Breaks, the most significant exhibition of his work so far.
He works in oil and acrylic on canvas and board, often at modest size, with a large body of acrylic works on paper alongside. Little has come to auction, so provenance through his galleries in London, Berlin and Mumbai, the series a painting belongs to and its exhibition history are the first things to establish.
Exeter, Saint Martins and the Two Boys
The Two Boys paintings show the artist and his brother perched on the branches of a banyan tree. The title of the Camden exhibition comes from the nursery rhyme Rock-a-bye Baby, and from the thought that the branch might not hold.
His earlier solo exhibitions include The Sun Never Sets at Huddersfield Art Gallery in 2018 and Midlands Arts Centre in 2019, A Murder of Crows at Ikon in Birmingham in 2019 and On a Limb at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai in 2023. The Arts Council Collection holds his painting Skeleton of 2014.
Iniva, the Courtauld and St Marylebone Crypt
Krishanu also writes and curates. His essays on art have been published by the Courtauld Gallery, the British Council and a-n, he has curated collaborative exhibitions for English Heritage and Iniva and co-curated others at the RIBA and the Whitechapel Gallery, and he teaches at Camden Art Centre and the Courtauld Institute and as a visiting lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts.
His earlier solo exhibitions were In Residence at the Parfitt Gallery in London in 2010 and Mission, in the crypt of St Marylebone Parish Church, in 2013. He was in The Mausoleum of Lost Objects at Iniva in 2008, This is England, shown in Preston and at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore in 2010, and in 2015 both Contemporary Drawings from Britain at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts and Stations of the Cross at Brentwood Cathedral. Beaconhouse and the China Academy of Art hold his work.
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