Writeups
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Between Perplexity and Dream
The naked and tonsured figure that serves G R Iranna as his key image is compacted from many ancestries. It fuses the yogi, the bhikshu, and the tirthankara, exemplars of transcendence drawn from Indic culture’s three major sacred traditions; in more secular key, it also encodes references to Gauguin and Bacon, the exponents of the Jorasanko circle, and the android martyr-saviours of science fiction. Such intertextuality is integral to Iranna’s logic of figuration, which engages vigorously with the human body cast in situations at once archetypal and political, suggestive of a deep archive of ceremonial physiology but also memorialising the present.
Press
