KRISHNA REDDY

Celebrated artist, wandering scholar, innovator and experimenter, Krishna Reddy is a pivotal figure in India’s artistic path through Modernism.

After completing his studies under Nandalal Bose at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1947, Reddy taught art at Kalakshetra in Madras for three years. Going abroad in 1951, he attended Slade School of Fine Arts, London, with Henry Moore, for two years. After Slade he moved to the continent where he furthered his contact with European Modernism, studying sculpture with Ossip Zadkine in Paris (1952–1955) and with Mario Marini in Milan (1956–1957). Also in Paris, he studied engraving (1953–1955) with S.W.Hayter at Atelier 17, which he later joined, becoming a professor and associate director in 1965. In 1977 Reddy moved to New York to teach at New York University where he established the print department and presently is Professor Emeritus in Art.

As a master printmaker, Reddy has been credited with a process allowing for simultaneous colour printing. The unique artist’s prints presented in the exhibition testify to Reddy’s explosive, exuberant approach to colour and fascinate us with the seemingly endless variation of one image from one plate, which the artist constantly sculpted and altered, printed in a rainbow of shifting colour.

Reddy’s work fuses a hyper-reductive figuration, with a transcendental, karmic, almost Blakean philosophy of a varied and beauteous unity amidst the turmoil of an anxious and fractured world. Nevertheless he remains highly cognizant of the paradox of creation and an artist’s ability, or sometime inability, to master the objects he employs and the subjects he depicts.