Matthew Krishanu has created Girl on a Bed, 2023 especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany Life Is More Important Than Art, 14 June - 17 September 2023.
Krishanu’s edition for Whitechapel Gallery is a reproduction of a painting, from a series entitled In Sickness and in Health, 2007 - 2022. Girl on a Bed, painted in 2007, is part of this group of 12 intimate paintings, small in scale, that chart a woman’s life journey through marriage, childbirth, motherhood and dying. The works were made by the artist over the course of more than a decade spent together with the writer Uschi Gatward before her untimely death from cancer in late 2021. The paintings bring together interwoven personal histories with entangled histories of painting - from Gwen John and Edward Hopper to Frida Kahlo and Indian miniature painting.
