Andrea Kirsh reviews V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life at Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through February 11, 2015.

Kirsh writes that seeing the show is "imperative for anyone wishing to engage with modern, non-Western art of the 1960s–1990s. Beyond that, it offers an intensely rich vision of the possibilities of painting… Gaitonde’s highly individual technique involved multiple layers of paint, some translucent, others opaque. This resulted in paintings with a seemingly indefinite, mysterious sense of space buried within them, and surfaces that clearly do not tell the entire story. According to the research of Sandhini Poddar, guest curator of the exhibition, Gaitonde applied his paint with palette knives and via a process in which he painted torn pieces of newspaper, which he used to transfer the paint to his canvases, in a process akin to monoprinting. This borrowing of techniques from printmaking to create technically complex paintings characterizes Paul Klee’s work, and is another thing I believe Gaitonde learned from Klee."