The Brooklyn Rail

Krishna Reddy opens his 1998 essay “Art Expression as a Learning Process” with a couplet by William Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” What follows is an evocative manifesto on creativity that challenges the efforts of mankind to organize a turbulent world, instead encouraging awe, that “transcendent state of observation.” Lifting its title from these lines, Krishna Reddy: Heaven in a Wildflower focuses on how Reddy’s innovative intaglio prints are manifestations of the artist’s philosophy of wonder toward the universe. Reddy’s prints dot the walls with careful explosions, as if a series of experiments in which particles collide to colorful and radiant effect.

Despite the fact Reddy lived and worked in New York City from 1976 until his death in 2018, during which he developed the printmaking department at New York University and became deeply involved with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Heaven in a Wildflower is the first solo exhibition in NYC on the artist in over forty years and seeks to address a serious gap in print scholarship.

Reddy’s essay “Art Expression as a Learning Process” is reprinted in the exhibition catalogue—below are a few excerpts understood as dispatches applicable to over five decades of art making:

Our organism is a complex assemblage, a celestial alchemy of space and time…. We witness movements of the inward life of things, a Nature where nothing stands still and reality is a continuously changing process…. The flowering part of this mysterious Nature is the splendour of human life, equipped with an open frame of mind, with planetary vision…. An artist can, like a true poet, in his leisure hours carry on his experiments in silence, and marvel.

A flash-bang stretches across Germination I [Seed Pushing] (1961), a technicolor net cast across a dark sky that echoes a seedling’s tendrils rooting through the soil. In Jellyfish (1955) and Butterfly Formation (1957), the creatures’ movements become their form. Reddy locates the pulse in these radiating stars, concentrating on how one experiences each creature through the ripples in the water and flutterings in the air, becoming light reflected into the back of our eyeball before being sewn back together in the brain. There are supernovas to be found all around.

Reddy’s abstractions based on nature’s potential energy and biological processes call to mind the work of Ruth Asawa and her multiplying biomorphs. But where Asawa floats, Reddy bursts.

Deeply carved, each of Reddy’s plates are akin to low-relief sculpture, an effect the artist achieved by using a motley crew of tools, including his beloved dentist’s drill named “Pierre,” which lies in a central vitrine. A series of photographs of Reddy’s studio in New York City, printed in the catalog, displays a workspace fit for a carpenter or medieval surgeon.

They were labs of sorts, Reddy’s printmaking studios. The technique for which Reddy is most known—viscosity printing—was co-developed at the famed Atelier 17, though only made possible by Reddy’s attention to material and curiosity for where a spill of linseed oil could lead. Inks mixed with increasing quantities of linseed oil can be layered onto a single plate using rollers of varying densities to reach the different depths, creating a multi-colored print in one pass. A phenomenal immediacy enters through this collapsing of the printmaking process.

However, curator Sarah Burney argues for a reading of Reddy’s career beyond the Eurocentric focus on Atelier 17, the traditionally recognizable pivot-point around which to organize the artist’s work as “before” and “after.” Instead, Burney posits how consideration for Reddy’s early education in India at the Rishi Valley School and Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, both alternative learning centers emphasizing the interconnected importance of science and the arts, brings more clarity to the philosophical scaffolding of the artist’s career.

Consider also how Reddy bore witness to the Great Bengal Famine, which killed an estimated three million people in 1943, drawing those deteriorating figures from memory years later. How Reddy’s activism during the Quit India Movement and the late-1960s Paris protests against Charles de Gaulle’s administration informed the print Three Figures (1967), a red-hot fireball-turned-sunflower enveloping an unbroken line of protestors standing shoulder to shoulder. The resin sculpture Untitled / Demonstration (with multiple figures) (1968), displayed alongside, mirrors and solidifies this sturdy form.

Here’s my favorite part: Shut your eyes tight and imagine a clown, the borderline terrifying kind. In that black infinity behind your eyelids, the specter glitters and reverberates. Reddy brings this kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic, vision into a vibrant unlimited grid in Great Clown (1981), where arcing juggling balls endlessly refract and multiply; motion is again at the forefront.

That the artist’s longest-running series centers on the figure of the circus clown is somewhat surprising, though less so once one considers Reddy’s clear sense of humor and sharply observant eye. Despite drawing inspiration from memories of visiting the circus with his young daughter, Reddy’s clowns are uneasy figures who materialize and dissolve, sink into wormholes, and reveal the grimaces behind their smiling masks throughout their many print iterations.

The viewer stares up the clown’s nostrils in Clown Juggler (1978), the figure’s eyes concerned and brow furrowed as he nervously watches the juggling balls in midair. The faceless crowd applauds. What does it mean to enact our routines day after day, continuing to perform normalcy amid the chaos of a colossal universe that will continue with or without you? That same universe that Reddy felt open to experiencing in its entirety could also be crushingly incomprehensible.

Reddy’s clowns seem to be experiencing a properly absurdist existential crisis. Heaven in a Wildflower, though, brings this narrative to a conclusion with Untitled [Woman of Sunflower] (1997): a central figure in a meditative state, reaching enlightenment.

There is simply so much to be said about this work. With a series of programming organized by Print Center New York culminating in a dedicated research symposium, a renewed interest in the artworks of Krishna Reddy seems assured.