“Ranjani Shettar, a young Indian artist based in Bangalore, makes her New York solo debut with this two-sculpture show, and it's a beauty..... With so much going on, it's little wonder that Ms. Shettar's work, so opulent in its modesty, has already gained attention.”
New York Times
Vasanta (Detail)
Talwar Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new installations by Ranjani Shettar. The artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S includes two gentle and intimately constructed, yet striking and compelling, new installations. Vasanta is a cosmic curtain woven with thousands of hand-rolled beeswax nodes that connect a vast web of dyed strings. The installation suspended from the ceiling with rhythmic yellow and green buds symbolize the transition from winter to spring, rural to urban, and organic to the manufactured. In Bloom is a luscious composition, laden with a bounty of red lacquered beads with inlays of glass celebrating the indulgence of the material while blossoming from the more spiritual and peaceful intensity of Vasanta. Employing organic materials invested with tradition and history, Ranjani Shettar creates multidimensional works that bring forth the metaphysical attributes of residing within a changing physical environment. She exposes the permeability of the often-distinct thresholds between craft and art, tradition and modernity, the physical and the spiritual while transforming the simple mundane into the magical.
“The organic qualities of Shettar’s work might be profitably read in the art-historical contexts of Arte Povera artist Marisa Merz, postminimalist sculptors of the same period such as Eva Hesse, Brazilian Neo-concrete artist Lygia Clark, or Argentinean artist Gego…Each structure invokes a shelter that is poetically suggestive of our oneiric ability to invest spaces with our own desires and phenomenological memories.”
Douglas Fogle, the Walker Art Center
IN BLOOM (Detail)
Ranjani Shettar’s works have been the subject of several museum exhibitions including solo presentations at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (The MET) (2018), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2019), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) (2009); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2011); The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, MA (2008); The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX (2008-9) and Hermes Fondation, Singapore (2011). Ranjani’s works have also been featured in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY (2010); Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi (2011, 2012, 2013), 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); 10th Liverpool Biennial, UK (2010); 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, PA (2008); 9th Lyon Biennial, France (2007); 8th Sharjah Biennial (2007); 15th Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006); Art Tower Mito, Japan, Artpace, Texas (2006); Marian Goodman Gallery (2006), Cartier Fondation, Paris (2005); Sainsbury Center, UK (2005), Wexner Center, OH (2005), The Walker Art Center, MN (2003), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, Italy (2003) and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2003). In 2012 in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York the artist created a limited-edition project, Varsha. Ranjani Shettar lives and works in Karnataka, India.
