KRISHNA REDDY | Whirlpool

Acquired directly from the artist, New York, 2006

The paper has yellowed due to age and there are minor creases, undulations, small irregularities and spots of foxing throughout. There are minor losses to the edges of the paper, which could be inherent. The work is in good overall condition, as viewed.
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Krishna Reddy first trained to be a mathematician and scientist. Reddy 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 Art and a foray into sculpture in Milan with Ossip Zadkine and Marino Marini in the 1950s, he returned to printmaking.  By the late 1950s, Reddy had moved to Paris, where he found himself in the heart of bohemian society. “There was one tiny little street,” Reddy recalled, “in which all the great artists gathered.” In the cafes of Montparnasse, Reddy would discuss how he had blended the spiritualism he had learned from his first teacher Krishnamurthy with European modernism. In Paris, Reddy joined Atelier 17, the studio of printmaker, Stanley William Hayter, and together they both developed “viscosity printing”. This innovative technique involved multiple colours being applied to the same metal printing plate, each paint mixed to a different thickness with linseed oil so that it didn’t contaminate the other. (O. Basciano, 'Krishna Reddy obituary', The Guardian, 30 August 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/aug/30/krishna-reddy-obituary)

"During this period [early 1960s] I tried to feel things in movement. This time it was the whirlpool. Working with gouges, burins and scrapers and machine tools, I plowed through the plate, creating spiraling liquid formations." (Krishna Reddy quoted in Krishna Reddy: A Retrospective, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1981, p. 69). The current work titled Whirlpool is representative of a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. By the early 1960s Reddy had truly mastered his innovative printing technique. Another edition of Whirlpool is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Here, this emotive composition is made up of varying depths of colour and line that enter and recede in space.