Krishna Reddy: The Andhra-born printmaker, sculptor who became India’s most transglobal artist

Reddy’s career was shaped by all the places he lived in, but most importantly by Paris where — along with Stanley William Hayter, founder of the prominent print studio Atelier 17 — he would develop the simultaneous colour printing technique, or the colour viscosity process, on which also rests his reputation as a global great of printmaking. He would eventually settle in New York in the late 1970s: it would remain his home until his death on August 22, 2018, at the age of 93.

Reddy’s birth centenary falls next year — he was born on July 15, 1925. As a prelude to the milestone, Kolkata’s Experimenter gallery has begun hosting exhibitions to explore the vast range and depth of Reddy’s lifelong oeuvre. Its show, titled ‘Of Friendships: Krishna Reddy & His World,’ is currently on view at its Ballygunge Place gallery in Kolkata till September 21; an earlier iteration of this exhibition was held at Experimenter Colaba (Mumbai), in April-June this year.

This exhibition juxtaposes key, rare and early works of Reddy, along with those by his artist friends, teachers and students such as Ram Kinkar Baij, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Stanley William Hayter, Shirley Witebsky, Judith Blum Reddy, Zarina, Mona Saudi, Gabor Peterdi and Nalini Malani that remained in Reddy’s New York studio, “where he had carefully filed them,” according to Priyanka Raja of Experimenter. Raja, who is a co-founder of the Experimenter gallery, along with her husband Prateek Raja, adds, “Even though he was at the forefront, Krishna was not just a solo actor. He saw himself as a mentor, teacher, and companion.”

Such A Long Journey

Experimenter, which opened in Kolkata in 2009, has presented some of Reddy’s iconic prints and etchings in this exhibition, such as River (1959), Whirlpool (1962), Germination (1963), Demonstrators (1968), and Great Clown (1980-81), to name only a few. Some of the characteristics of Reddy’s art that stand out include his affinity for colour and a preference for nature, both of which owe in large measure to his time spent at Santiniketan (1942-47). Studying painting and sculpture at Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University in outdoor settings, under the mentorship of Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij, Reddy imbibed a love for nature that would influence his organic art throughout his long career. This was also a time of great political and social upheaval in Bengal, leading up to India’s Independence and Partition, preceded by the manmade famine of 1943 that would kill millions. Reddy’s artistic sensibility did not remain untouched by these events as is evident in his sketches of beaten down human figures such as Untitled (Bengal Famine), an ink and paper work from 1950, which is part of the current exhibition.

Prateek Raja writes about this impact on the artist in the exhibition catalogue: “These lived experiences enabled Reddy to be an empathetic and discerning artist, teacher and humanist as he traversed the world over the next decades, always challenging the limits that confronted him in his practice — materially, philosophically and technically.”

It was with the support of world-renowned philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti — a lifelong influence since the time a young Reddy studied at the former’s Rishi Valley School — that the artist travelled to London, where he apprenticed under English sculptor Henry Moore, known for his semi-abstract and monumental sculptures. Reddy’s next stop was Paris, where the Belarusian-born French sculptor Ossip Zadkine introduced him to Hayter of Atelier 17. This is where the most seminal years of Reddy’s career were spent — he and Hayter developed the colour viscosity process that allowed them to achieve a range of extraordinary colours on prints, as evident in quite a few examples of Reddy’s works at the ongoing show.

In this context, the juxtaposition of the works by Reddy and Hayter is important not just for the study of their individual practices but also to see how they impacted each other. For instance, the show presents Hayter’s La Vague (The Wave, 1960) as also Reddy’s Wave (1963), both multicolour viscosity prints, similar yet with individual styles of the artists.

Trained as a sculptor, Reddy applied sculptural techniques to printing, which made his metal plates acquire characteristics of a relief sculpture. Prateek Raja writes, “For Reddy, the metal plates that formed the matrix for printing were like sculptures that he engraved upon with a variety of hand and machine tools, controlling their minute depths to fractions of millimetres. A body of such metal plates, made over his long career and rarely seen in public, are on view at the gallery.”

In the early 1960s, Reddy and wife Shirley Witebsky, an American artist, travelled to Canada on an invitation to collaborate on a sculpture and participate in a symposium, which would mark the beginning of several such invitations by American institutes, resulting in Reddy settling down in New York; he would join the New York University as a professor and director of graphs and prints in 1976. Witebsky passed away in 1966 and Reddy would later marry American artist Judith Blum; works by both these artists are also part of the ongoing show. Crystal, a 1960 multicolour viscosity print on paper by Witebsky, can almost be mistaken for a Krishna Reddy print. The similar styles of the two are evocative of their concurrent training at Atelier 17.

The Man of the Moment

While abstract prints remained the most important part of Reddy’s artistic oeuvre, he essayed other genres of art as well, especially in the early years of his career. The Experimenter exhibition gives a glimpse of the range of Reddy’s work, by including ink or pen on paper works and sculptures. However, it’s the prints that hog the limelight, which are layered abstract essays on deep philosophical issues of life. Of these, The Clown series is especially significant, one of whose editions is on view at the Experimenter.

The story goes that when Reddy took his daughter Aparna to a circus in New York in 1978, he was enchanted by the clowns himself, incorporating the genial character in his works over the following decades. The prints of this series are a revelation on how an artist can visualise a character as definite as a clown through abstraction, rendered in different colours in different editions. Seed Pushing (1961) and Germination (1963) are two other examples of the philosophical depth of his art through which he explores the birth of life and its significance.

What is little known about him is that he also dabbled in posters, making figurative protest drawings, first for the Quit India movement in 1942, and then during the student uprising in Paris in 1968. In fact, his Demonstrators series of works from 1968 are a direct reaction to the events in Paris that year. It was his immediate empathy with the zeitgeist of the times that made him a sensitive and responsive artist; multiple such experiences across different cities of the world created a unique awareness in him that informed his artwork till the very end.

This exhibition seems like a teaser for the bigger plans that the Rajas have for Reddy’s centenary next year, among which a retrospective in New York is definitely on the cards. The Rajas, who have held multiple seminal exhibitions of Reddy’s work at Experimenter Kolkata earlier and even at their Mumbai space since it opened in 2022, feel that his greatest significance lies in the fact that not only was he a transglobal artist himself but his influence, too, was transglobal. Yet, rues Priyanka, “Krishna has not exactly got his time in the sun.” May be, the current exhibition and the ones coming in his centenary year will bring him the spotlight he deserves in the land of his birth, with which he never lost connection.