Born in 1970 in Karnataka, Iranna completed his BFA in ’92 from the College of Visual Arts, Gulbarga, and earned his MFA Replica Chanel Handbags degree from Delhi College of Art in 1994.
At the very outset, Iranna’s career as a painter has been speckled with achievements. In ’93, he was chosen by M.F. Husain and Ram Kumar as the winner of the “In Search of Talent” award at Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi. In ’97 he received the 40th National Academy Award from Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, as well as the All India Fine Arts and Crafts (AIFACS) Award. In ’99 he was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Scholarship that allowed him to spend a year at a residency at the prestigious Wimbledon School of Art in London.
Iranna has had several solo exhibitions at The Guild, Mumbai and Gallery Espace, New Delhi. He is represented in the United States by the New York-based Aicon Gallery. His work has been featured in global group art shows, most notably at the San Jose Museum of Art in California,replica louis USA (2010), and at the Signature Art Prize show at the Singapore Museum (2009). His artworks are part of museum collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, Bharat Bhawan, Bhopal, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, and SAM Museum, USA, and the private collection of Chester and David Hurwitz.
Tempered Branches was Iranna’s most recent solo show held this year at AICON Gallery, New York, comprising several important recent series of paintings, along with a monumental wall drawing and installation piece. The exhibition demanded a critique of our popular conception of growth and development, both in nature and human thought. The work continues to build upon Iranna’s career-spanning investigation into how social frameworks and religious dogmas, traditionally viewed as net-cultural positives, either directly or indirectly serve to suppress free thought and organic growth, often with complex and disastrous consequences.
Three other more recent landmark solos for him were Limning Heterotopias at Gallery Espace in 2012 and Ribbed Routes at The Guild Art Gallery in Mumbai. Both shows introduced Iranna’s reinterpretation of the symbolic figure of the monk and served as treatises on mortality and spirituality, while his 2008 solo at The Stainless Gallery, New Delhi and AICON Gallery, London and New York, titled Birth of Blindness proposed an alternative reading of the ongoing crisis of mindless conformity.
According to art critic Ranjit Hoskote, “In a period that has registered the ascendancy of critical artistic strategies that unmask and dismantle, G.R. Iranna stands apart by espousing an art of affirmation, of measured additive procedures and philosophic reflections.”
