Matthew Krishanu

Matthew Krishanu was born in 1980 in Bradford, United Kingdom, and spent a formative portion of his childhood in Bangladesh before returning to England at the age of twelve. His father was a Christian priest and his mother a theologian, and the textures of that upbringing — religious life, family bonds, the landscapes and light of Bengal, and the particular psychological world of childhood — remain the animating concerns of his painting practice. Based in London, Krishanu works across a body of work in which memory functions not as nostalgia but as a site of ambiguity, historical weight, and quiet unease.

His paintings return repeatedly to a set of charged motifs: trees, birds, children, and the spaces — domestic, ecclesiastical, natural — that frame early experience. Works such as House of Crows and A Murder of Crows draw on avian imagery to explore darkness, allegory, and latent threat, while the Playground series sustains a psychological tension beneath the surface of childhood play. Arrow and Pulpit brings together the authority of religious institutions and the vulnerability of the body, and On a Limb extends his sustained engagement with branching forms and arboreal memory. The 2018–2019 project The Sun Never Sets connects this personal visual language to broader questions of empire and geography. His 2024 painting Banyan (Two Boys) was acquired by Tate, marking significant institutional recognition, and Banyan (Girl) extends the same tree-rooted, memory-oriented vocabulary. Works by Krishanu are also held in the DCMS Government Art Collection, London.

Krishanu is represented by Niru Ratnam Gallery in London, Tanya Leighton in Berlin, and Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. His solo exhibition history spans these galleries and beyond: Picture Plane at Niru Ratnam Gallery in 2020, Arrow and Pulpit at Tanya Leighton, Berlin in 2021, Playground at Niru Ratnam Gallery in 2022, On a Limb at Jhaveri Contemporary in 2023, Immerse at Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles in 2024, and The Bough Breaks at Camden Art Centre, London in 2024. Group exhibitions have included Childhood Now at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, The Kingfisher's Wing at GRIMM, New York, and the travelling exhibition Beyond the Page, focused on South Asian miniature painting. His work is included in the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, opening in December 2025, and a solo presentation, Falling Into Place, is forthcoming at Salon 94, New York.