Balraj Khanna's work will be familiar to many Birmingham residents, whether they know it or not. His monumental painting Astral Dance, displayed on the safety curtain at the Hippodrome, has prepared countless theatregoers for performances since its completion in 2001. The dreamlike vision of biomorphic forms – pulsing blobs, splayed fingers, blooming whorls – is set against variegated orange hues, conjuring magic and wonder with little to disturb the audience.
A turning away from horror
The introductory text notes that Khanna, born in Punjab in 1939, witnessed the 1947 partition of India as a young boy. If that generational trauma influenced his work, it appears only in a turning away from horror towards the consolations of fantasy. He moved to London in 1962, but the era's social revolutions are no more obvious. Instead, his practice as an artist and novelist summons more innocent memories: street entertainment and theatrical artifice.
One 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 rehabilitation from a motorcycle accident, Ladies With Qualification is so direct in its expression of suffering that one wonders whether this effervescent artist abandoned figuration because he found it too revealing. The surrounding abstractions struggle to match its charge.
Balancing order and chaos
A standout is A Grasshopper's Eye View, a title suggested by painter FN Souza, an early supporter. Colourfully striped, spotted and dotted globules float through verdant colour, structured by vertical struts and subtle horizontal balances. The title is apt: a grasshopper might not see how the wider world is organised, but can be confident in prevailing rules to jump from stalk to stalk.
This balance is difficult to maintain. Unravelled, a tangle of white lines against night-blue, might meet Paul Klee's maxim of taking a line for a walk, but Khanna's line meanders politely, turning back when it veers too close to edges. It feels too well behaved to drag its owner into the unconscious, as Klee hoped.
Cosmic ambitions and quieter works
It is entertaining to see an artist try on many styles: hard-edge minimalism, a rhapsody in pink scattered with footprints, a gloss finish anticipating spray paint (achieved by blowing paint through a straw). Two significant 1970 paintings, Splash and Festival, show an invisible force pulling forms resembling glistening scales and fading petals into a central vortex. They promise much.
On the second floor, Khanna settles into a style of amoebas, tropical fish and bioluminescent invertebrates floating through candy-coloured galaxies – cosmic in ambition and bombastic in scale. The late Big Bang is typical: shapes like children's toys drifting through a Day-Glo ether. Like magic tricks, these paintings attract the gaze but do not hold it long. The artist preferred to excite the eye rather than trouble the mind.
Three remarkable works are at odds with the general bravado. Sunset in Sinai is a grainy landscape of depressions and folds that might be the surface of Mars or the fabric of spacetime; Dunes, in bright pastel tones, is embedded with trails of string; Ocean is a delicate interplay of pinks and greens. These melancholy close studies are far more transcendent than the cosmic scenes, making one wish Khanna had more often resisted the urge to entertain.
