Untitled (River)

Krishna Reddy had his early education in Santiniketan but spent most of his long and illustrious career between Europe and America. Along with being a consummate printmaker and artist, he was also a great thinker. Reddy’s technical brilliance, coupled with his abstract imagery and philosophy, was radically different from the narrative trend that dominated Indian art of the Fifties and Sixties. Depicting a landscape in southern France, the textures in the foreground of this work set off the river and its curving shoreline. The artist combined the subject with design, colour and texture and there is a sense of movement and energy radiating the surfaces while the forms seem illuminated from within. The different reliefs have been organised into a design that looks as if it had been made up of jewels embedded in paper.