Pooja Iranna

AVAILABLE WORKS  |  PUBLICATIONS

Pooja Iranna received her BFA and MFA in Painting from College of Art New Delhi. She received the Charles Wallace India Trust Award in 2002. Some of her prominent shows include ‘Metamorphic Mathematics’ at The Guild, Mumbai; Trends & Trivia at The Visual Arts Centre, Hong Kong; Walk the Line at Avanthay Contemporary, Zurich; ‘India Revealed’, curated by Antonio Manfred at Cam Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, Naples, Italy; Korea-India Contemporary Art Exchange Exhibition, Seoul, Korea and Emerging India’, by art Alive at the Henry Moore Gallery, London. Her works are in private collections in India, New York, Bangkok, and Hong Kong.

“Pooja’s art has made slight visual shifts every few years since she began working after graduating from the College of Art, New Delhi in 1995 but she has remained true to her inspirational precedents – built urban structures, how they order and articulate space and the response of the human body and the human psyche to these spaces. The particular brand of her visual language has existed in the blurred boundaries between painting, photography, mixed media collages and sculptures and between architecture, urban spatiality and abstraction.

When looking at the photographic works we are aware firstly of the soaring access, of spatiality articulated as a spectacle. This free movement is aided but also ordered by the architectural elements, creating frames which are patterned by grids, reducing the magnificence to the manageable. What they are present day high-rises, headquarters of Multinational Corporations, Banks or World Agencies, shiny glass clad buildings that belong to no-place and can be seen in every-place. But what they have become in Pooja’s works are radical architecture, emptying space of time and event thus creating a shock of absolute fragmentation and dislocation.

These spatial imaginations can not be dissociated from the material corpus of the city. The artist takes pleasure in multiplying architectural perspectives in order to mislead the spectator. This architecture may cause anxiety due to its potentially limitless character, yet it is the limitlessness of the constructed that also frees it, and us, from the shackles of confinement and thus urban imprisonment. The ever-expanding boundaries of the built space become our new frontiers, our anxious landscapes.”

 (Excerpt from Catalogue Essay by Deeksha Nath)