Fusing sculpture and installation

First Museum solo of internationally renowned artist Ranjani Shettar takes place in India. Dr.Bhau Daji Lad Museum showcases her series, entitled ‘High Tide for a Blue Moon’. It’s also her first ever exhibition in the city of Mumbai. Over half the artworks exhibited are on view for first time in the country, including major new artworks done over the last two years. Here’s a quick look at her artistic thought process and career:

• The artist's usage of traditional and modern crafts to sculpt natural and industrial materials accentuates the tenuous relationship between industry and nature. She resolves this by uncovering the beauty within their co existence and in the collaboration between man and nature.
  
• In creating environments with sculpture and installation, she fuses the two realms together with dynamic yet graceful forms and textures, revealing the spectacle and magnanimity of natural phenomena. Seduced by their simplicity and openness, our experience of her works yields humility and a surrender to their splendor. Her materials yield to unfamiliar realizations.
  
• The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne had launched its new contemporary art space with an exhibition of work by her late last year. In ‘Dewdrops and Sunshine’, she showcased her unique approach to sculpture, comprising material experimentation, engagement with nature, relationship to space, and exploration of tradition coupled with resonance with modernism.
  
• An accompanying note stated: “She often transforms natural phenomena into mystical and magical forms, to create sculptures clearly informed by a material openness, which borrows from rich Indian craft traditions filtered through her own sensibility.
  
• Explaining her thought process, the artist quips, “There’s an element of chance in the way you see the sculpture, specifically in terms of how it manages to position itself in space according to movement of air in the space.”
• Ranjani Shettar’s work has been on view in numerous significant institutions and exhibitions worldwide. It can currently be seen at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY in On Line: Drawing Through the 20th Century. Her recent prominent solos have been held at prestigious venues like The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009), The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX (2008-09) and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2008).
• Other prominent participations include 10th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK (2010); 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2008), 9th Lyon Biennial, France (2007), 8th Sharjah Biennale (2007), and 15th Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006).