Taking place across Southbank Centre, Everyday Heroes is an outdoor exhibition that celebrates the contributions that key workers and frontline staff have made during the pandemic.

Many of the contributing artists and writers have chosen to portray family members, friends, or people in their local communities. Often disarmingly intimate, each portrait – whether originally rendered in paint, charcoal, photography, collage, or with language – is vividly imaginative and emotionally compelling in its own way.

Together, they highlight the sheer scale of the collective response to this crisis, and the many different ways that people across the country have come together to support one another, and find a way through it.

Featured artists: Michael Armitage, Lydia Blakeley, Jeremy Deller, Laura Grace Ford, Mahtab Hussain, Evan Ifekoya, Matthew Krishanu, Ryan Mosley, Janette Parris, Alessandro Raho, Silvia Rosi, Benjamin Senior, Juergen Teller, Caroline Walker and Barbara Walker.

Featured poets: Romalyn Ante, Raymond Antrobus, Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay, Vanessa Kisuule and Roger Robinson.

Matthew Krishanu focuses on four female religious workers who, along with religious workers across the country, continued to find ways to serve their community throughout the crisis. The subjects are Rehanah Sadiq, a Muslim chaplain for two Birmingham NHS hospital trusts; Eve Pitts, Britain’s first black female Church of England vicar; Margaret Jacobi, a rabbi at a progressive Jewish synagogue; and Deseta Davis, a pastor and prison chaplain. All four live in Birmingham, a city that Krishanu knows well, and are pictured at work, sometimes dressed in ceremonial clothes, or personal protective equipment.

Watch: Matthew Krishanu on his works for Everyday Heroes ↗

Watch: Curators Ralph Rugoff and Cedar Lewisohn discuss Everyday Heroes ↗

In this video, Ralph Rugoff, Hayward Gallery Director, and Cedar Lewisohn, Curator: Site Design, introduce Everyday Heroes, and discuss some of the challenges of producing a large-scale outdoor exhibition that responds to our current moment.

Jhaveri Contemporary is delighted to present paintings by British artist Matthew Krishanu from three ongoing series, Another Country, Expatriates, and Mission, bringing together multiple narrative threads. Another Country is a deeply personal and emotive body of work that takes as its main subject the artist’s childhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Expatriates considers the complex politics that accompany expat communities in developing countries, and Mission explores the life of the church in South Asia.

Krishanu’s work skilfully negotiates memory, using an expansive and technically diverse painting style as a lens for recollection. The paintings rely on a brevity and directness that come from a cerebral and scholarly approach to painting practice, and a deep engagement with art history. Krishanu’s paintings combine Western and indigenous traditions of painting to create a language that is as personal as it is particular.

Much like a film, Krishanu’s paintings are populated with recurring characters and locations: the artist and his family, church congregations, expatriates in suits and saris, and the lush landscapes of Bangladesh, all painted in a palette that evokes a faded polaroid or a hand-coloured photograph from another era.

‍Ikon presents an exhibition curated by Jonathan Watkins and Aisha Khalid at Lahore Biennale 02.

Work by Mahtab Hussain, Matthew Krishanu, Farwa Moledina and Osman Yousefzada, all of South Asian British heritage, will be shown alongside that of two prominent Pakistani artists, Ali Kazim and Imran Qureshi.

The Contemporary Art Society has acquired three paintings by London-based artist Matthew Krishanu for Huddersfield Gallery.

Huddersfield Art Gallery holds a significant collection of 19th and 20th century painting including the first Francis Bacon to enter a public collection, a work also gifted by the Contemporary Art Society. Krishanu was born locally and had his first solo show at the Huddersfield Art Gallery in 2018. The acquisition of his work builds on the existing legacy of painting while incorporating contemporary and global perspectives.

A preoccupation with people, more than their painterly aesthetic, starts an intriguing conversation between Matthew Krishanu and Sosa Joseph. Beyond their shared affinity for broad brushstrokes, translucent layers of colour and washed out hues is their inquisitive nature. With something of an anthropologist’s eye, both Krishanu and Joseph create a visual ethnography, capturing habitual routines and profiling their subjects. But where a classical anthropologist would value distanced observation, these artists make emotions their mainstay.

View text by Cleo Roberts and list of works here

Jhaveri Contemporary
3rd Floor Devidas Mansion
4 Mereweather road
Apollo Bandar Colaba
Mumbai 400 001

Iniva presents: Corvus. A painting installation by Matthew Krishanu

Crows, rooks, jackdaws and ravens: corvid, corvus, and corvidae. They are considered to be cosmopolitan creatures endowed with a preternatural intelligence. Over 120 species exist and the genus Corvus makes up over a third of the entire family. They are legion and amongst us every single day.

Matthew Krishanu’s crows could be described as relatives of sorts, sharing similarities of pose and abstracted form, always painted singly and never in flight. Standing on twin legs gives them an anthropomorphic quality, looking directly at the viewer or stepping awkwardly away. Krishanu has been documenting London crows for over seven years and painting their intimate portraits in oil on canvas board. He has captured the minutiae of their lives - perching, feeding, pacing or standing - that only a sustained period of observation could reveal.

12 September — 2 November 2019,
Monday (10—5pm) to Saturday (10am—4pm)
Artist talk: 30 November, 2—3pm

The Stuart Hall Library, 16 John Islip St, London SW1P 4JU

This exhibition centres around two series of images that the painter has been developing over a number of years: House of God, which depicts landscapes punctuated by the crosses of churches, and Crow, a series begun in 2012.

Krishanu’s crows are painted at small scale in oil or acrylic on board. Never caught in flight, they stand, stride and perch, at times in profile, at others facing you down head on. The paintings are stark, often comprised of densely worked tonal textures of black on black, with shades of darkest blues and browns worked in, set against pale washes of background. Their close cropping gives the skeletal forms of the birds an abstract quality; when grouped, the paintings reveal their individual idiosyncrasies.

Krishanu sees parallels between his Crow and House of God series, both of which are devoid of humans. In House of God, the focus is brought to the simple form of the Christian cross. Krishanu is interested in the ambivalent relationship we may have to this symbol. As with the crows, its symbolic quality is loaded, evoking a multitude of potential reactions in the viewer.

Krishanu has been invited to install a number of works from these series in response to the 3x3x3 metre cubic gallery space at 92 Webster Road.

30 March — 7 April 2019, daily 12—6pm
Preview: Friday 29 March 2019, 6—9pm

House of Crows, Matt's Gallery
92 Webster Road, London, SE16 4DF

Furthering the conversation initiated in Painting Childhood: From Holbein to Freud, this sister-exhibition brings together the works of three contemporary figurative painters – Chantal Joffe, Mark Fairnington and Matthew Krishanu.

Drawn to the subject of children, each of these British artists depict childhood in very different ways. Fierce, tender and highly personal, Chantal Joffe’s expressive paintings chart the growth of her daughter Esme from birth to adolescence, in relation to her own changing role as a mother. Mark Fairnington’s approach turns a scientific eye to the depiction of his twin sons with hyper-realistic precision, while Matthew Krishanu’s radiant paintings reveal memories of his own childhood in Bangladesh. Together, these three artists present fresh perspectives on what constitutes childhood today.

Childhood Now, Compton Verney, Warwickshire CV35 9HZ

Exhibition dates: 16 March — 16 June, 2019

Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday, 11am — 5pm, last entry 4pm

Ticketed: £14.50/£13.50

Artist and filmmaker Rachel Maclean examines the world of cuteness by curating works from the Arts Council Collection and Birmingham’s collection to reveal how objects and images can have the unique ability to be simultaneously sweet and sinister.

Too Cute! presents a range of artworks that show different takes on cuteness. The works in the exhibition range vastly in age and intention, moving from contemporary based issues to 19th-century oil paintings. Maclean’s fascination is with the elusive moment where cute objects slip into their opposite and instead of inspiring care, insight fear and disgust.

Too Cute! Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Chamberlain Square, Birmingham, B3 3DH

Exhibition dates: 26 January — 12 May 2019

Opening times: Monday — Thursday 10am — 5pm | Friday 10.30am — 5pm | Saturday & Sunday 10am — 5pm

Admission free.

Curated by Robert Priseman, Anna McNay, Małgorzata Taraszkiewicz-Zwolicka and Małgorzata Ruszkowska-Macur

Artsits: David Ainley, Iain Andrews, Amanda Ansell, Louis Appleby, Richard Baker, Karl Bielik, Claudia Böse, John Brennan, Julian Brown, Simon Burton, Ruth Calland, Emma Cameron, Simon Carter, Maria Chevska, Jules Clarke, Wayne Clough, Ben Coode-Adams, Ben Cove, Lucy Cox, Andrew Crane, Pen Dalton, Alan Davie, Jeffrey Dennis, Lisa Denyer, Sam Douglas, Annabel Dover, Natalie Dowse, Fiona Eastwood, Nathan Eastwood, Tracey Emin, Geraint Evans, Paul Galyer, Pippa Gatty, Terry Greene, Susan Gunn, Susie Hamilton, Alex Hanna, David Hockney, Marguerite Horner, Barbara Howey, Phil Illingworth, Linda Ingham, Silvie Jacobi, Kelly Jayne, Matthew Krishanu, Bryan Lavelle, Andrew Litten, Cathy Lomax, Paula MacArthur, David Manley, Enzo Marra, Monica Metsers, Nicholas Middleton, Andrew Munoz, Keith Murdoch, Paul Newman, Stephen Newton, Gideon Pain, Andrew Parkinson, Mandy Payne, Charley Peters, Ruth Philo, Alison Pilkington, Narbi Price, Robert Priseman, Freya Purdue, James Quin, Greg Rook, Katherine Russell, Stephen Snoddy, Ben Snowden, David Sullivan, Harvey Taylor, Molly Thomson, Ehryn Torrell, Judith Tucker, Philip Tyler, Julie Umerle, Marius von Brasch, Mary Webb, Sean Williams and Fionn Wilson

The National Museum, Gdańsk, The Green Gate, ul. Długi Targ 24, 80-828 Gdańsk, Poland

Exhibition dates: 14 March — 2 June 2019

Summer season:
1 May — 30 September | Tues — Sun 10.00 — 17.00 | Mon — closed.

Winter season:
1 October — 30 April | Tues — Sun 9.00 — 16.00 | Mon — closed.

Supported by the British Council and The Academy of Fine Arts, Gdansk

A catalogue featuring texts by Jenni Lomax (curator, writer and former Director of Camden Arts centre), and Ruxmini Choudhury (assistant curator at Dhaka Art Summit), is available to buy from Cornerhouse Publications.

London-based painter Matthew Krishanu takes inspiration from his childhood spent in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka to produce his dream-like, reflective paintings.

Matthew’s British father and Indian mother completed theological training in Birmingham, then relocated their family to Dhaka in the early 1980s, working for the Church of Bangladesh. His work explores his eleven years living in Bangladesh, while capturing his distinctive bond with his brother. His paintings explore the childhood gaze of the boys, depicting experiences of an atmospheric yet complex world of expatriates, missionaries and expansive landscapes.

Matthew Krishanu says: “I want the viewer to sense the complications: that the scenes depicted are not always ones of innocence, that there are historical and cultural currents at play, and that the childhood world is easily punctured by adult constructions and beliefs.”

Jenni Lomax (former director of Camden Arts Centre) writes in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue: “Autobiography plays some part in all Krishanu’s work, whether populated by figures or uninhabited like his landscapes. However, his paintings are given a deliberate edge of uncertainty that folds reality in with the collapsing of time.”

The show includes two paintings recently acquired by the Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London.

Join us to celebrate the launch of ‘The Sun Never Sets’ at the opening event on Saturday 19 January from 2pm - 4pm, where you can see the work and meet artist Matthew Krishanu.

There will also be an Artist Talk and Tour on Thursday 21 February from 6pm-7.30pm in the gallery – a chance to join artist Matthew and MAC Visual Arts Producer Jess Litherland for a private evening tour of ‘The Sun Never Sets’.

An associated exhibition, ‘Matthew Krishanu: A Murder of Crows’, is showing throughout the Ikon Gallery building during the run of ‘The Sun Never Sets’.

A catalogue is available to buy featuring texts by Jenni Lomax and Ruxmini Choudhury (assistant curator at Dhaka Art Summit).

The Sun Never Sets, Midlands Arts Centre, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, B12 9QH

Dozens of Matthew Krishanu’s painted crows will be displayed throughout Ikon’s neo-gothic premises. Always painted singly and never in flight they appear almost anthropomorphic on their twin legs, whether looking directly at the viewer or stepping away.

Mischievous, malevolent and sometimes comical, Krishanu’s birds are partly inspired by crows in art and literature; for example, ‘Crow’ by Ted Hughes, Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, or the mythical crows of trickster tales. Inspired by bird watching in England, they are also signifiers of Krishanu’s childhood in Bangladesh where crows were always close by, cawing in trees or pecking at rubbish dumps.

The exhibition coincides with Matthew Krishanu’s exhibition The Sun Never Sets at MAC Birmingham (12 January – 10 March 2019)

Opening event: Saturday 19 January 5 - 7pm.

A Murder of Crows, Ikon Gallery, 1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace, Birmingham, B1 2HS

This is the UK’s longest-established painting prize, founded in 1957, and open to all UK-based artists working with paint.

The competition culminates in an exhibition held at the Walker Art Gallery every two years, forming a key strand of the Liverpool Biennial. 2018 will mark the prize’s 60th anniversary and its 30th exhibition. Although the appearance of each exhibition changes, the principles remain constant: to support artists and to bring to Liverpool the best contemporary painting from across the UK.

This year’s entries deal with a range of subjects from Amazon parcel collection lockers to da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Materials as diverse as aluminium, cardboard and compostable food recycling bags have replaced canvas for some artists, and found objects, coins and felt tip used in addition to paint.

Past winners of the art prize include David Hockney (1967), Mary Martin (1969), Peter Doig (1993), Keith Coventry (2010), Sarah Pickstone (2012) and Rose Wylie (2014). The winner of the prestigious first prize in 2016 was Michael Simpson with his painting Squint.

Tuesday 24 July — Saturday 1 September 2018: East GalleryNUA, Norwich

7 September — 24 October: Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, London

Crowd, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 200cm (photo: Peter Mallet)

In the City brings together dynamic work by nine established painters working with imagery of the city and ideas around urban space in locations ranging from the UK, Canada, and the USA to Bangladesh, Myanmar, and India.

Trevor Burgess, Stephen Carter, Mark Crofton Bell, Marguerite Horner, Barbara Howey, Matthew Krishanu, Lee Maelzer, Jock McFadyen, Tanmoy Samanta

More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and artists have long represented city life in their work, from the painters of Dutch street scenes and interiors, to twentieth century British artists such as Bomberg and Sickert.

In this exhibition, the ever-changing contemporary urban environment is captured through the practice of painting, transforming and combining source material from different media such as photographs, images from newspapers, the internet as well as drawings and sketches.

The exhibition’s international scope registers the impact of global mobility and communications on artists’ sense of place. The artists give us oblique glimpses of their experience of different urban environments across three continents: Toronto and New York, Bangladesh and India, the UK and France, conveying real, imagined and remembered spaces. Commercial and residential buildings, transportation, and the natural world are all represented, as are the inhabitants of the modern city.

The exhibition includes a display of preparatory material that offers an insight into the artists’ working methods.

Matthew Krishanu — The Sun Never Sets (installation view), Huddersfield Art Gallery (photo: Olivia Hemingway)

The Sun Never Sets is London-based artist Matthew Krishanu’s first solo show in a public-funded gallery. The exhibition brings together over 30 paintings, including ten large-scale works, exploring figuration, place, and memory. The works centre on two boys (the artist and his brother) growing up in Bangladesh, and their experience of a complex world that includes expatriates, missionaries, and expansive landscapes.

Matthew Krishanu says: “I want the viewer to sense the complications: that the scenes depicted are not always ones of innocence, that there are historical and cultural currents at play, and that the childhood world is easily punctured by adult constructions and beliefs.”

The show includes four paintings recently acquired by the Arts Council Collection, to be exhibited together for the first time. Skeleton (2014) depicts two boys standing with the bones of a cow, which is missing its forelegs – its skeleton was washed up on the banks of a river, during the severe floods in Bangladesh in 1988. In Boy and Mask (2017), a boy stands in front of a tiger’s mask – the mask seems animated or alive, while the boy has closed eyes. Ordination (2017) portrays a church scene (part of the artist’s ‘Mission’ series of works) in which a new priest is being ordained. In Girl with Book (2012), a person sits alone on a bed, an open book behind her. Questions of costume, symbol and status are raised in all these paintings – whether of adults seen performing ceremonial roles, or children posing in shorts and t-shirts.

The Sun Never Sets is accompanied by a free publication with a text by independent writer and curator Matt Price.

Matthew Krishanu – The Sun Never Sets (installation view), Huddersfield Art Gallery (photo: Olivia Hemingway)

Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 4pm

Address: Huddersfield Art Gallery, Princess Alexandra Walk, Huddersfield, HD1 2SU

Panel discussion: Painting – People and Places, Saturday 21st July 1.30 – 3pm

Lindsey Bull, Matthew Krishanu, Cara Nahaul, Narbi Price, Judith Tucker (chair)

Closing event: Matthew Krishanu in conversation with Amanprit Sandhu, Saturday 15 September 2 – 3pm

Free – all welcome

The Sun Never Sets is supported by funding from Arts Council England

The Arts Council Collection is the UK’s largest national loan collection of modern and contemporary art. 47 works by 25 artists were acquired for the nation in 2017-18.

Recommendations to purchase innovative works of art that reflect artistic practice in Britain today are made by a changing group of external advisors to the Arts Council Collection Acquisitions Committee. For 2017-18 they were: Brian Cass, Head of Exhibitions, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Anthea Hamilton, artist; Helen Legg, Director, Spike Island, Bristol and Morgan Quaintance, writer and curator. The chair of the Acquisitions Committee for 2017-18 was Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate Galleries. The three permanent members of the acquisitions committee are: Jill Constantine, Director, Arts Council Collection; Peter Heslip, Director, Visual Arts, Arts Council England; and Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery, London.

Between 7th July and 10th January 2018, 80 works of art drawn from the Priseman Seabrook Collection of 21st century British Painting will go on display in 4 Chinese art museums for the very first time. The host institutions are the Yantai Art Museum, Artall Gallery, Nanjing, Jiangsu Art Gallery, Nanjing and the Tianjin Academy of Fine Art, Tianjin.

David Ainley, Iain Andrews, Amanda Ansell, Louis Appleby, Richard Baker, Karl Bielik, Claudia Böse, Day Bowman, John Brennan, Julian Brown, Simon Burton, Marco Cali, Ruth Calland, Emma Cameron, Simon Carter, Jules Clarke, Ben Cove, Lucy Cox, Andrew Crane, Pen Dalton, Jeffrey Dennis, Lisa Denyer, Sam Douglas, Annabel Dover, Natalie Dowse, Fiona Eastwood, Nathan Eastwood, Wendy Elia, Geraint Evans, Lucian Freud, Paul Galyer, Pippa Gatty, Terry Greene, Susan Gunn, Susie Hamilton, Alex Hanna, David Hockney, Marguerite Horner, Barbara Howey, Phil Illingworth, Linda Ingham, Matthew Krishanu, Bryan Lavelle, Laura Leahy, Andrew Litten, Cathy Lomax, Clementine McGaw, Paula MacArthur, Lee Maelzer, David Manley, Enzo Marra, Monica Metsers, Nicholas Middleton, Andrew Munoz, Keith Murdoch, Paul Newman, Stephen Newton, Gideon Pain, Andrew Parkinson, Mandy Payne, Charley Peters, Ruth Philo, Barbara Pierson, Alison Pilkington, Robert Priseman, Freya Purdue, Greg Rook, Katherine Russell, Wendy Saunders, Stephen Snoddy, David Sullivan, Harvey Taylor, Ehryn Torrell, Delia Tournay-Godfrey, Judith Tucker, Julie Umerle, Mary Webb, Rhonda Whitehead, Sean Williams, Fionn Wilson

Works by Matthew Krishanu, Chris Hawtin and Glenn Brown

The Immediacy of Paint: Surface symposium focuses on questioning how artists are currently exploring surface and the materiality of paint in contemporary art.

Immediacy of Paint: Surface is a one day event focused on how artists are currently exploring surface and the materiality of painting in the digital. This is the second symposium to be held at The University of Suffolk to include talks and a panel discussion presented by artists and academics. By bringing together artists, academics and art students in our region whose practice focus is on painting in the contemporary moment, the symposium explores the immediacy of paint through surface.Immediacy of Paint: Surface is a one day event focused on how artists are currently exploring surface and the materiality of painting in the digital. This is the second symposium to be held at The University of Suffolk to include talks and a panel discussion presented by artists and academics. By bringing together artists, academics and art students in our region whose practice focus is on painting in the contemporary moment, the symposium explores the immediacy of paint through surface.

Special Guest Speaker: Glenn Brown, International Artist

Speakers include: Kim Anno, International Painter, Photographer, and Filmmaker/video Artist Chris Hawtin, Artist, Dr. Matthew Bowman, Art critic and Lecturer at the University of Suffolk and Colchester School of Art Shaun Camp, Chair, Artist and Leader Year 0 Pathways at Norwich University of Arts Matthew Krishanu, Artist, Curator, Lecturer

Opening statements by Dr Lisa Wade, Head of the Department of Arts and Humanities at The University of Suffolk.

Closing statements by Matthew Krishanu

www.paintsymposium.co.uk

Expatriates is a solo exhibition of paintings of English expatriates in India and Bangladesh. The portraits are shown alongside fragmentary landscapes that depict trees, overgrown ruins, and old missionary buildings. A colonial history of cultural power and exchange is evoked – represented in the poses the expatriates assume, the clothes (or costumes) they wear, and the buildings and scenery they inhabit.

Matthew Krishanu was born in Bradford, UK, and spent his childhood in Bangladesh. Expatriates is the first of a series of solo shows programmed by Contemporary British Painting, an artist-led organisation which explores and promotes current trends in British painting.

Preview: 6 — 8pm Wednesday 26 October 2016

Dates: 27 October — Saturday 05 November 2016

Opening Times: Monday to Friday: 10am — 8pm, Saturday: 10am — 5pm, Sunday closed

Address: Westminster Reference Library (1st floor), 35 St Martin’s Street, London, WC2H 7HP The exhibition is curated with Anneka French.

Matthew Krishanu will be in conversation with writer and curator Hamja Ahsan at 3pm on Saturday 05 November 2016.