The Dancer on the Horse: Reflections on the Art of Iranna GR

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Iranna GR was born in 1970, and has painted professionally for 10 years. His studentship took place amid great upheaval in the Indian class system and a fierce debate about Indian art. The state ceased to control the economy thus opening the country up to private business. Although this was generally positive it also had the effect of generating religious and traditionalist friction. Between 1999 and 2000 Iranna acted as artist-in-residence at Wimbledon School of Art, London. His art is thought to be a stylistic challenge to post-modernism, using instead the representative, idealistic and modernist language of contemporary Indian painting. He has won several awards, held a series of one-man shows and participated in exhibitions in Amsterdam and Chicago. The Dancer on the Horse: Reflections on the Art of Iranna GR is a meditation on the life and work of the artist. Ranjit Hoskote emphasizes the spirituality of the artist’s work and the importance of his Guru. Frequently, Iranna depicts a solitary figure in an unreal landscape, and this has been interpreted by the author as a self-portrait of one who feels estranged from his context. ‘The Dancer on the Horse’ refers to a self-portrait by this name. The dancer must maintain both his own logical plan and take into account the movement of the horse which is unpredictable. This balancing act is a metaphor for the artist’s obligation to find the appropriate relationship between the inner and outer realities and the private space of the studio and the public space of the gallery. For Ranjit Hoskote, Iranna is immensely successful in achieving this equilibrium.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ranjit Hoskote

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and independent curator of contemporary art. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Zones of Assault (1991), The Cartographer's Apprentice (2000) and The Sleepwalker's Archive (2001). He has also co-translated Vasant Dahake's Marathi poems under the title A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992) and edited the anthology, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking, 2002). He has also written a critical biography of the artist Jehangir Sabavala (Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer, 1998) and a monograph on the painter Sudhir Patwardhan (The Complicit Observer, 2004). As a literary organizer, Hoskote has been associated with the Poetry Circle, Bombay, since its inception in 1986, and was its President from 1992 to 1997. Hoskote was Visiting Writer and Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (1995) and has held a writing residency at the Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003). He received the Sanskriti Award for Literature in 1996 and the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award in 2004. Hoskote lives and works in Bombay.

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Bibliographic information

Title
The Dancer on the Horse: Reflections on the Art of Iranna GR
Author
Edition
1st ed.
Publisher
ISBN
8188204922
Length
128p., 180 Illustrations
Subjects