“The Bough Breaks” seemed to topple visitors into a tropical paradise. The banyan tree, symbol of eternal life—some say the Buddha found enlightenment under its spreading branches—was the leitmotif in this exhibition of paintings by an artist who was born in Bradford in the north of England, grew up in Bangladesh, and now lives in London.
Featuring sixty-five works made between 2010 and this year, the presentation was Krishanu’s first substantial solo show at a British institution, an artistic coming of age. Delicate works on paper—such as Boat on Water, 2015, in which smears of acrylic paint suggest the contours of a boat bobbing on indigo seas—counterpointed large-scale dramas in oils. The exhibition’s relatively recent works are permeated with memories of Krishanu’s Bangladeshi boyhood. The series “Another Country,” 2012–,tells the tale of Krishanu and his brother, depicted both as small boys and adolescents, roaming Bangladesh’s verdant foliage. The protagonists of Two Boys on a Boat, 2017, perch on a little vessel as it traverses cerulean waters. Two Boys on a Horse, 2024, sees them riding through rolling green fields, whereas in Banyan (Boy), 2023, a minuscule red-shirted figure nestles on a swooping brown branch of the vast tree. Visitors also meet the artist’s Indian mother, a scholar of liberation theology, and his white British father, a priest in the Church of Bangladesh. In Preaching, 2018, we see the mother robed in a flaming-orange sari reading a Bible as two candle-bearing nuns cluster around her. Her head veiled, she resembles Mother Mary. But, just as we think that these are vignettes of a blessed childhood, we think again: Skeleton, 2014, shows Krishanu and his brother standing on the carcass of an animal, its head contorted as if in anguish.
