In the late 1950s, on moving to Paris, the Indian artist and printmaker Krishna Reddy, who has died aged 93, found himself in the heart of bohemian society. “There was one tiny little street,”
Reddy recalled, “in which all the great artists gathered.” He regularly met Alberto Giacometti, and would look in on Constantin Brâncuşi every Sunday. In the cafes of Montparnasse,
Reddy would discuss how the spiritualism he had learned from his first teacher, the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, had blended with European modernism. Underpinning his ideas was a
technical knowhow that produced several innovations in the medium Reddy made his own.
Reddy joined Atelier 17, the Parisian studio of a fellow printmaker, Stanley William Hayter, and together they developed “viscosity printing”, in which multiple colours can be applied to the
same metal printing plate, each paint mixed to a different thickness with linseed oil so that it does not contaminate the others. Whirlpool, a work from 1963 held in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is typical in its frantic composition of discrete blues.
Born to Nandanoor and Lakshmamma Reddy, agricultural workers, in a village on the outskirts of Chittoor in the state of Andhra Pradesh, Krishna could hardly read or write until the age of 11 and
yet expressed a prodigious talent for art. Copying the mythological paintings of south Indian gods and goddesses, and inspired by Nandanoor, who made sculptures for the local temple, from the age
of six the boy would paint murals.
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