Matthew Krishanu’s Divine Paintings About Religion And Upbringing In South Asia
Personal history, memory and imagination are key to the work of London-based painter Matthew Krishanu, whose atmospheric, pared-back compositions explore childhood, religion and the legacies of colonialism. Many of his paintings are informed by his upbringing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where his father worked as a priest with the Anglican missionary agency United Society Partners in the Gospel.
Krishanu’s time in South Asia in the 1980s has inspired several bodies of work, from his “Another Country” series in which the artist and his brother are depicted as boys roaming the expansive Bengal landscape to his “Mission” series in which religious meetings, ceremonies and churches are similarly painted in a simple, abbreviated style with thin washes of paint and bold, assertive marks.
Steeped in art history, his works take inspiration from Byzantine painting and artists such as Luc Tuymans, Mamma Andersson and El Greco. His flat, schematized compositions recall the Ajanta cave paintings, another of his many diverse influences. Yet his uncomplicated aesthetic belies a complex web of historical and cultural undercurrents.
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The history of modern Bangladesh is inextricably intertwined with British intervention, and Krishanu is acutely aware that his childhood years cannot be disentangled from colonial history. Though he is deeply skeptical of organized religion and troubled by the way that Christianity has historically been used by those in power to justify wars and enable white supremacy, his paintings avoid overt critique.
“I don’t really have a definite position on how I want people to read the works,” he said. “They’re not like Francis Bacon’s pope paintings; I don’t want to paint about religion in a polemical way but in a way that develops the conversation around it.”
Krishanu, who professes no religious faith, is keen to point out that he is not making religious paintings but pictures about religion. When he began the “Mission” series in 2010, he knew that its imagery might be misinterpreted yet continued anyway, describing his decision to tackle religious subjects as “an itch that I wanted to scratch.”
Works such as “Communion” (2017), “Mission” (2020) and “Blessing” (2024) (currently on display in London as part of Krishanu’s major solo exhibition “The Bough Breaks”) depict the artist’s White father appearing incongruous amid Brown-skinned congregants.
“I’m interested in portraying whiteness as ‘otherness,’” he said. “So when I paint my father as a White priest in front of an Asian congregation, he becomes ‘other’ to the world that I’ve constructed in the paintings.”
However, Krishanu says that it is not essential to know the figure’s identity; more important is that viewers question the presence of the White priest, whom he sees as a symbol of European power in the Global South.
Other paintings, as in his “Holy Family” series, feature Bengali Christian bishops, nuns and priests. They serve as a counterpoint to depictions of White Christian figures perpetuated by Western art history. With titles including “Bishop’s Robes” (2024), “Four Nuns” (2020) and “Priest and Baby” (2016), these sensitively painted portraits are respectful and deeply human. For Krishanu, they are also about role play, about dressing up in costumes and assuming a particular identity within a religious context.
In the painting “Mission School” (2017), a group of Bangladeshi children sit on a classroom floor, gathered around a print of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” The quiet image refers to the way that Western art has tended to ignore Christ’s ethnicity, depicting him as a White European.
While it is not unreasonable for images of Jesus to reflect the ethnic characteristics of the culture in which they are created, the problem for Krishanu is when those images become archetypical, being used in the Global South to promote the idea of Christianity as a “White” religion.
“That’s what is happening a lot of the time in African, Indian and South American mission schools,” he said. “Brown children are being handed books showing Christ and the saints as White and with images of good little children who are also all White. That was something I was very aware of as a child and was one of the reasons why, as a teenager, I told my parents that I wouldn’t be getting confirmed, because I didn’t want to be a part of all that.”
Krishanu had a print of the “Last Supper” in his childhood bedroom in Bangladesh.
“I never really thought of it as art history; it was always a symbol of religion and of Western culture,” he said.
This childhood memory is represented in “Bedroom (Last Supper, 2021),” where Leonardo’s painting hangs above a large four-post bed in which Krishanu and his brother lie sleeping.
In Bangladesh, Krishanu’s family lived beneath the church, and though the building was his home, he never felt like he belonged, observing church life from a distance. At three hours long, he found the Good Friday service especially arduous. To cope with the boredom, he remembers reading the “Chronicles of Narnia,” which allowed him to escape into the world of his imagination.
Despite finding the Christian message of Christ dying for sin and rising from the dead unconvincing, Krishanu does not describe himself as an atheist or even agnostic.
“I have a lot of time for Black liberation theology,” he said. “I have a lot of time for people like James H. Cone, or the way that Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. might quote Jesus as a liberation figure; I don’t reject any of that. What I reject is imperial Christianity.”
In 1992, Krishanu and his family moved back to the U.K., where his mother, an Indian theologian, pursued her doctoral studies and his father worked as a team vicar in a local Anglican church in Southampton. The years spent in Bangladesh became hazy memories, kept alive by family photo albums and, subsequently, by Krishanu’s paintings.
While Krishanu’s works are deeply personal and tackle weighty issues, they have an endearing charm and a lightness of touch that is hard to resist. This is a delicate balancing act, but one that Krishanu pulls off with aplomb.
“Matthew Krishanu: The Bough Breaks” is at Camden Art Centre, London, until June 23, 2024. Visit the Camden Art Centre website for more information.
David Trigg is a writer and art historian based in the U.K. You can find him on Instagram @davidtriggwriter.