Artist, art educator and curator Ezra Benus introduced members to the work of Krishna Reddy in the exhibit Heaven in a Wildflower, the first monographic exhibition in New York of the late Indian artist in over 40 years.
Krishna Reddy (1925–2018) is best known as a master intaglio printmaker who was instrumental in developing a process called viscosity printing, which allows an artist to print a multi-colored image from a single printing plate. The exhibit highlights this innovation by considering the philosophical underpinnings of the artist’s kaleidoscopic art and inventive approach to his creative practice.
The exhibition is curated by Sarah Burney in collaboration with an advisory committee of Reddy’s close colleagues. Heaven in a Wildflower brings together over 50 prints alongside key sculptures, ephemera, and working materials from the artist’s estate in order to demonstrate Reddy’s material and conceptual approach to the groundbreaking viscosity printmaking technique he developed in the 1950s and 60s.
Contextualizing his prints with drawings, sculptures, and the artist’s own retrofitted tools and working materials, the exhibition coalesces around the major themes Reddy explored in his work and traces the trajectory of a sensitive intellectual primed by his education and life experiences to consider the world with unique openness and curiosity. On view are works from across several decades showing how Reddy used his groundbreaking viscosity technique to achieve almost sculptural variations of color and form in his abstract and semi-abstract prints.