Balraj Khanna was born in the Punjab, India, in 1940. He studied in Chandigarh before moving to England in 1962, where he had intended to study at Oxford University. External circumstances disrupted his plans and instead he forged a career as an artist, author and curator based in London.
Painter, writer and curator Balraj Khanna was born into a middle-class family in the Punjab, India, in 1940. As a child he witnessed the Partition of India in 1947. After studying English Literature in Chandigarh, India, Khanna was to continue his studies in England at Oxford University, but his plans were disrupted by war in 1962 between China and India. Arriving in London in November 1962, during what was to be a long and bitter winter, he found solace in painting and drawing.
Khanna's interest in painting was encouraged by the writer and critic Mulk Raj Anand, who provided him with introductions to important figures in the British art world, F.N. Souza, Avinash Chandra, W.G. Archer, and George Butcher. Souza and Chandra would become close friends as Khanna, supported by his family, pursued his career as an artist. Souza warned him of the 'pitiless prejudice, indifference, and scorn' he would encounter in London (Khanna, Born in India, Made in England). By 1964, Khanna was a member of the Indian Painters Collective (later Indian Artists UK), formed to represent, promote, and advocate for artists from India working in London, and he participated in the group's first exhibition, Six Indian Painters, held at India House in Aldwych. This was followed by his first solo exhibition in London at the New Vision Centre in October 1965. Khanna married his French wife, Francine and, between 1965 and 1970, lived and worked between England and France. This included a period in France recuperating after a motorbike accident where, living on forestry land owned by his brother-in-law, he painted his early abstract work Forest Walk; after his recovery he returned to London. Khanna lectured on Indian art at the Commonwealth Institute, London, in 1972-73, and from 1981 at numerous universities, colleges, museums and galleries in England. He worked as a foreign correspondent during the war between India and Pakistan in 1971-72, painting Birth of a Nation (National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi) in this period.
Khanna has also worked as an author, curator and gallerist. He co-founded the Horizon Gallery in London for the Indian Arts Council in January 1987, acting as chairman of the IAC in 1983-88. He was also a member of the Exhibition Committee for the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Art Advisory Group for the South Bank Arts Centre, in 1988. In the 1990s and 2000s, Khanna curated exhibitions exploring aspects of Indian art, including the National Touring Exhibitions for the Hayward Gallery, Kalighat Paintings - 1930, Popular Indian Art (1993-94), Krishna: the Divine Lover (1997-98), and Human and Divine: 2000 Years of Indian Sculpture (2000-01). As a celebrated novelist, Khanna won the Winifred Holtby Prize from the Royal Society of Literature for his Nation of Fools in 1984, and the Mahatma Gandhi Prize for Fiction from the Greater London Council (GLC) for his unpublished novel Partition in 1985.
Although Khanna experimented with figurative work in the 1970s, he is best known for his vibrant, often kaleidoscopic, abstract and semi-abstract paintings. His work in three dimensions includes sculptural tondos created from hand-cut abstract forms derived from earlier paintings. Between 1987 and 1992, Khanna was commissioned to create five large paintings for St Mary's Hospital, Paddington; another painting, for the Conquest Hospital in Hastings, was made 1997-98. He created a mosaic mural for the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) Machynlleth, Wales, in 1997-99. In 2001, he designed the safety curtain for Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre, a painting 42 feet wide by 26 feet high titled Astral Dance. Khanna has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Serpentine Gallery, London. A major retrospective of his work was held at MOMA Machynlleth in 2013. His works have also featured in numerous group shows, including Between Two Cultures at the Barbican Centre, London, in 1982, The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery in 1989, and Artist & Empire at Tate Britain in 2017. In 2020, his work was included in Ben Uri 's online exhibition Midnight's Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain. In 2022, he published his autobiography Balraj Khanna: Born in India Made in England, accompanied by an exhibition at Osborne Samuel in Dering Street, London W1. Balraj Khanna lives and works in west London with a studio in his home. His work is held in numerous UK public collections including the Arts Council Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Bristol City Art Gallery, Bradford Museums and Galleries, Imperial Health Charity Art Collection, MOMA Machynlleth, and the V&A Museum. The British Library sound archive holds his recorded lifestory as part of its Artists' Lives collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Balraj Khanna]
Publications related to [Balraj Khanna] in the Ben Uri Library