The work of Balraj Khanna will be familiar to many residents of Birmingham, whether they know it or not. Displayed on the safety curtain at the Hippodrome, his monumental painting Astral Dance has prepared countless theatregoers for the evening’s performance since it was completed in 2001. Khanna produced a dreamlike vision of biomorphic forms – pulsing blobs, splayed fingers, blooming whorls – set against variegated orange hues.
Its delightful colours and benign shapes conjure a palpable sense of magic and wonder, while also containing little that might disturb the audience’s mind beyond the curtain’s raising. This show is likewise one of flash and spectacle. The introductory text makes a point of the fact that, having been born in Punjab in 1939, Khanna witnessed the 1947 partition of India as a young boy.
But if that generational trauma influenced his work as an artist, then it is apparent only in a turning away from horror towards the consolations of fantasy. He moved to London in 1962, just in time for the invention of sex (in Philip Larkin’s account), but the social revolutions of the era are no more obvious. Instead, his practice as an artist (and a picaresque novelist) summons more innocent memories: the astonishments of street entertainment and the glamorous artifice of theatre.
One tantalising early work hints at darkness behind the dazzle. In a mulch-green landscape, a body struggles to unwrap itself from a winding shroud. Composed during the artist’s rehabilitation from a motorcycle accident, the puzzlingly titled Ladies With Qualification is so direct in its expression of suffering that you wonder whether this otherwise effervescent artist abandoned figuration because he found it too revealing.
The surrounding abstractions struggle to match its charge, shoehorning blustery squiggles into strict grids that can impose only the most superficial measure of control. This is an issue that will dog the work. A standout is A Grasshopper’s Eye View, the title of which was suggested by the enduringly great Indian painter FN Souza, an early supporter of Khanna.
Colourfully striped, spotted and dotted globules float through a field of verdant colour structured by regular vertical struts and subtle horizontal balances that allow the eye to wander at leisure around the picture without fear of getting lost in the confusion. The title is apt: a grasshopper might not be able to see how the wider world is organised, but can be confident enough in the prevailing rules (of gravity, of the distribution of forces) to jump from one stalk to the next. This balance is difficult to maintain.
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