Born in 1925 Lyallpur now in Pakistan, Krishen Khanna grew up in Lahore, leaving to attend secondary school at Imperial Service College, in Windsor, England, graduating and returning to Lahore in 1942. In 1946 he started working with Grindlays Bank for 14 years. Khanna resigned from the bank in 1961 and devoted his full-time to art. He is a self-taught artist and is a recipient of the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1962.
Khannas art practice is embedded in the unfoldment of his own life experiences. He was also invited to join the Progressive Artists' Group and worked with his contemporaries Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Padamsee to name a few. Most of Khanna's work are figurative; he chose to not explore the abstraction that most of his contemporaries were delving into. Works like his Nocturne series capture the heaviness of a worker's tired body resting at the end of the day as faithfully as his Bandwallas series captures the exuberant energy of the band of musicians.
Khanna's artworks are very well appreciated and celebrated not only in India but Internationally as well. His most famous series being the band walas. In 2011, the Government of India awarded him with the Padma Bhushan; in 2004 he received the Padma Shri from the President of India and in 1997 he received the Kala Ratna from the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, New Delhi.
Khanna lives and works in New Delhi.