Important Notice

From the mid 1960’s Krishen Khanna developed an image of the Pieta that he was to revisit throughout his career. The variations in styles and postures served to highlight the nexus of aesthetic, social and religious issues that this icon has come to represent for the artist.

“The Pieta or the Mater Dolorosa, as she holds the exhausted Christ on his descent from the cross…relates to his concern with the subject of the dead and the dying,... From the mid 1960’s Krishen Khanna developed an image of the Pieta that he was to revisit throughout his career. The variations in styles and postures served to highlight the nexus of aesthetic, social and religious issues that this icon has come to represent for the artist.

“The Pieta or the Mater Dolorosa, as she holds the exhausted Christ on his descent from the cross…relates to his concern with the subject of the dead and the dying, as much as with the persecuted figure of the Christ. Khanna uses the essential composition of the seated Mother Mary cradling her son, as widely perpetuated by the Pieta of Michaelangelo…In a later painting, Pieta (1988), Khanna introduces two Marys at the base of the cross. What merits particular attention is the Mater Dolorosa’s shift froma passive suffering figure to an active resisting one, a working class woman with the strong hands of her class, who protests the persecution of her exhausted son.” (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna, The Embrace of Love, Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 2005, p.25, 30)

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