KRISHNA REDDY | PASTORALE

Galerie van de Loo, Munich

Acquired from the above circa 2016

R. Sengupta, Krishna's Cosmos : The Creativity of an Artist, Sculptor & Teacher, Grantha Corporation 2003, illustration p. 58 (another from the edition)

Exhibition Catalogue: Krishna Reddy, A Retrospective, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1981-82, frontispiece (another from the edition)

R. Bartolomew, Contemporary Indian Art Series: Krishna Reddy, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1974, illustration pl. 3 (another from the edition)

Krishna Reddy first trained to be a mathematician and scientist. He then went on to study art at Santiniketan, which is where he learned to make black and white etchings. After a sojourn at the Slade School of Fine Arts and a foray into sculpture in Milan with Ossip Zadkine and Marino Marini, he returned to printmaking and pioneered a new printing technique. He layered color on a printing plate simultaneously, so that they could be superimposed, yet their different viscosities would naturally cause them to separate, achieving a spectacular effect and eliminating the need to apply one color to the plate at a time.

Speaking of this work, Krishna Reddy has articulated "I was inspired by Beethoven's "Pastorale" to work this plate. The power of the music exploded into an extraordinary space embedded with shapes. In the skeleton on interwoven structures, strange forms and shapes emerged which I tried to perfect by carving with scrapers and burins. the more I worked the more dynamic the landscape became." (K. Reddy, Catalogue Raisonne, Exhibition catalogue, Krishna Reddy: A Retrospective, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1981, p. 68)