Reading The Fine Print

Do I have any influences?” asks artist Krishna Reddy,on a crisp morning at the India International Centre. As his eyes dart from the trees to the sunny patch on the grass,he says,“In my case,I am searching for nature. I was born in a village and we had no art centres,but somehow art became food of my mind.” The 86-year-old master of intaglio printmaking was instrumental in developing a new printing process to produce multi-coloured prints,the technique of viscosity printing.

The US-based artist was in Delhi for a retrospective curated by Roobina Karode. Titled “The Embodied Image. Krishna Reddy: A Retrospective”,the exhibition at Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) comprises around 150 works of the artist,from his days as an art student in Santiniketan to subsequent phases in Chennai,Paris,London,and finally New York,where he taught art for almost 30 years at New York University. “He is a revolutionary figure in the history of printmaking. This exhibition is like a laboratory,with his works,printing press and metal tablets,” says Karode,looking at the works that include Reddy’s initial landscapes in watercolours,monochrome figures of the Bengal famine,meticulous etchings on metal tablets and the paintings that were made when he was part of the printmaking group Atelier 17,in Paris.

For Reddy,art has been an evolution of sorts and he has always taken inspiration from real-life experiences. The clown that often makes an appearance in his works,for instance,comes from his memories of a circus that he attended years ago. “I took my daughter to a circus in New York. All of a sudden I saw hundreds of clowns. All the clowns do the same thing,which came across as a sort of mass media. In America,everything is commercial. Somehow,a clown has become a creative human being,” says the artist who received a Padma Shri in 1972. Several other awards followed,but Reddy remains indifferent. “My works are like memories,and memories can be a terrible thing in this age”,he says,adding “Titles and positions don’t matter. I just live day-to-day.”

The exhibition is on at Twin Art Gallery,ICV Mess,Janpath,IGNCA (Gate No.1),till January 21