As a long-term collaborator, and a dear friend, of G.R. Iranna, I have had a ringside view of his career. I have witnessed new directions emerge in his work, and I have shared memorable moments with him. As we get ready to open a spectacular solo exhibition, “Floating Verses” at Aicon Contemporary in the Fall of 2022, I cannot help but notice the happy co-incidence of the two professional threads of my life, art and the environment, come together, connecting with each other vehemently and unapologetically, in this body of work.

I knew G.R. Iranna’s work, before I had ever met him. Thanks to the large, bold canvases by him, collected by Chester and Davida Herwitz in 1998.Thereby making Iranna, to the best of my knowledge, the youngest artist in the legendary Herwitz Collection. Making him and his work the connective tissue joining Modern Masters, like M.F. Husain, Somnath Hore, and K. Laxma Goud, to Iranna’s present-day cohort of Jitish Kallat, Rumana Husain, and Ashim Purakayastha. I have witnessed Iranna embrace this role of the connector naturally, and with a great deal of enthusiasm.

Stylistically, Iranna’s work has connected artistic zeitgeist across time. The earliest work, collected by Chester and Davida Herwitz, reflected a young man posited as a male nude, dominating the landscape. Iranna has told me, with some pride, that he has never painted the female nude – a staple of the art world. From those early days of questioning art world staples, he has moved, still maintaining the presence of the male nude, to questioning organized religion’s weight upon our world. Identity, often founded on notions religious domination, have been the cause of much anguish in contemporary India, and indeed the contemporary world. Iranna has, again and again, has held up a mirror to it, through his work.

More recently, as we have all gotten older, with concerns about our legacy, and our generation’s legacy, Iranna has continued questioning man’s desire to dominate, but his concern has shifted from the damage that we do to each other, to our impact on the world. It was a pivotal moment, for his career and one I was lucky to witness firsthand, when Iranna spent 12 hours painting a tree in distress, on the walls of Aicon Gallery. We had the foresight to capture all of it on video. I joke with Iranna that when we are all gone, and his art scattered in collections all around the world, that video with its dramatic time lapse, captured and viewable on the internet, will outlive us and continue to generate conversation around his work.

With the concerns that drive him and his art, G.R. Iranna is an artist of all mankind, not just of India. As his New York gallerist, this is of particular concern to myself and my talented team. We are keen, therefore, to present him in that light in this exhibition and in the future.