FIVE SOUTH ASIAN ARTISTS IN LONDON

AD visits young trailblazing artists from South Asia and its diaspora in their London studios to discover their practices and unique interpretations of a shared history.

- MAANAV JALAN

MATTHEW KRISHANU

Krishanu's paintings revisit scenes from his childhood in Bangladesh and India, and life in London, where he has lived for nearly two decades. In his Blackhorse Lane studio, we see examples from his years-long series standing next to each other.

In Another Country-an ongoing series he started in 2012-Krishanu and his brother perch on trees and monkey bars in an unnamed landscape. His daughter takes their place in a 2024 painting, climbing a tree in Epping Forest, London, guarded at the base by the painter's late wife, writer Uschi Gatward.

While rooted in personal memory, the ambition of Krishanu's paintings goes beyond autobiography. His figures gesture at the criss-crossing social histories of "the majority of people in the world", that is, those "with brown skin and black hair". Krishanu's Mission series, likewise, is less the story of his missionary father in Bangladesh and more a reflection on Western cultural hegemony in South Asia. Within these paintings, we see rooms in which iconic pictures from the canon of Western art history hang, such as Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper.

These "quotations" as Krishanu calls them, recontextualized in a South Asian setting, make a clever flip-it is now the canon that does not quite belong in the room. Each canvas in Krishanu's studio is a membrane, tensely holding together many worlds, "many lineages".

JASLEEN KAUR