The work dated to 1975 depicts a group of six men gathered around a corpse lying on an examination table. The surrounding figures stare, prod and examine the corpse and one holding a saw appears to be about to dismember the corpse. Despite the morbid subject the painting becomes a penetrating if ironic analysis of the theme of life and death, the irony being that the unknown corpse appears to take on greater significance in death than in life.  Similar themes are explored in his Biblical paintings such Christ Lowered from the Cross and Doubting Thomas. None of these works however are overtly r🤡e🍌ligious in sentiment but instead appear to raise questions about the inevitable suffering and fate of the common man in the world and more particularly in India itself.  

'From 1960 to 1965, Krishen frequently travelled to Europe and America, exhibiting with Charles Egan in New York and the Leicester Gallery in London. Delhi gradually registered its presence on Krishen's canvas with its sharp economic disparity, its overbearing political presence. As a city of political bosses and a swelling labour force, it became an ideal backdrop for him to realize what interested him most: the continuity and contrast between the mundane and the sublime, the ordinary and the epic dimension. It would  not be wrong to say that Krishen's interest in human endeavour is really pitched at the opposite ends of the banal and the epoch-making: the oscillation between these extremes determines his responses to the personal and the political...' (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna A Critical Biography, New Delhi, 2001).