Important Notice

More Images

Lot 7

 

Quick Zoom

Sudarshan Shetty's practice largely centers on sculpture and installation, and his works display an intriguing combination of the representational and the abstract. Although he trained as a painter, Shetty became increasingly interested in sculpture and installation over the course of his career, allowing him to layer his creations with multiple narratives. In 1996, he attended a sculpture workshop in Scotland and since then his association with... Sudarshan Shetty's practice largely centers on sculpture and installation, and his works display an intriguing combination of the representational and the abstract. Although he trained as a painter, Shetty became increasingly interested in sculpture and installation over the course of his career, allowing him to layer his creations with multiple narratives. In 1996, he attended a sculpture workshop in Scotland and since then his association with the physicality of objects has only intensified, resulting in bigger and increasingly complex works of art. His solo exhibitions since the early 2000s have displayed monumental kinetic assemblages involving large pieces of furniture, boats, bathtubs, stringed instruments and even a mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Shetty's oeuvre reflects the various different dimensions of contemporary urban life. Nonetheless, he constantly strives to escape the binding social frameworks of daily life by creating lacunas in them through provocative assemblages of their mundane fragments. His works reassemble objects to reiterate and make us examine our responses to experiences we encounter on a regular basis.

The present lot is one of the works created for the exhibition Consanguinity, held at India Habitat Center in New Delhi. Here, the artist attempts to bring to light the sense of kinship shared by humankind by drawing from his personal experiences, and, in the process, alluding to the universality of human existence. Art historian Kavita Singh, writing about Shetty's practice, recalls "Consanguinity was made in Shetty's father's declining months. As the artist's father sickened, as his blood filled with poisons and his circulatory system finally failed, Shetty's meditations on mortality led to an array of dark toys that externalized a body's workings and vulnerability… These are some of the themes that recur in his work - death, loss, transience; the feeble resistance that memory offers and its inevitable erasure; the rhythms of life and their Sisyphean futility; the corruption of emotion and the incapacity to have authentic experience; the ease with which the quotidian turns malignant. And yet, despite this catalogue of hopeless themes, viewing Shetty's work is never a bleak experience. The works themselves are filled with playful metaphors and unlikely juxtapositions of domestic objects and macabre sculptures, often wickedly animated with motors and pumps. The sensuality of the objects creates uncertainty: is this a wound leaking blood or an orifice dripping juice? The ingenuity and inventiveness of the works evoke pleasure and surprise" ("The Falling Statue and The Spinning Feather", Art India:, Volume XV, Issue III, 2010, p.82).

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site