The International Avant-Garde, No.14 1962

N. Krishna Reddy made "The International Avant-Garde, No.14" as an etching. It’s a small piece, but feels like you could lose yourself in it, right? I imagine the artist hunched over the plate, scratching away, building up these tangled, spindly lines, so close and intimate. What was it like to carve out this vision, line by line? It looks like a thorny bush, or maybe the inside of someone’s head—all these connections firing at once. There's a real tension between the stark black and white, and the delicate, almost frantic mark-making. It reminds me of other printmakers like Dürer, who could conjure whole worlds with just a few lines, but also of abstract painters who pile on layer after layer, searching for some kind of truth. Artists are constantly borrowing and riffing off each other, and each one of us brings something new to the conversation. Painting is an ongoing experiment, and these are the kinds of questions that keep me coming back to the studio every day.