Ranjani Shettar

Talwar Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new installations by Ranjani Shettar. The exhibition will open to the public on March 22, and will be on view through May 13. There will be an opening reception with the Artist on Wednesday, March 22 from 6-8 pm. The public is invited.

On view will be two new installations. Heliotropes (2005-2006), a collection of linear forms, hand sewn and molded from latex in a playful suspension, occupies considerable air space in the north gallery, and appears to swim towards the light pouring in from the windows. Hoomalae (2005), in the second gallery, is a delicate and intricate lattice of colored threads and hand molded beeswax; its five crescent structures rise from the floor, weaving an intricate courtship that seems to converge just beyond our sight.

Ranjani Shettar's work, inspired by nature and drawn from experience, combines movement in form and content in which exacting lines sculpted in space are invested with the attributes of the employed materials. Traversing her installations one experiences their exceptional beauty and fortitude of engineering while gently becoming aware of their all so human spirit. One notices this in the resilience of the pods in their search for light in Heliotropes, or the uplifting benevolence imbued in Hoomalae.

This year Ranjani Shettar was selected as 2006 International Artist in Residence at ARTPACE, San Antonio, Texas. Her works are currently on view at ARTPACE through May 2006 in an exhibition curated by Douglas Fogle. Currently her work, Vasanta, is on view in Landscape Confection at The Orange County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, a show curated by Helen Molesworth which traveled from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. Her work will be on view in the upcoming Zones of Contact, XV Sydney Biennale, Australia opening in June 2006.

Ranjani Shettar was born in 1977 in Bangalore, India and received her Bachelors (1998) and Masters (2000) in Sculpture from Chitrakala Parishath (Institute for Fine Arts), Bangalore. Recent exhibitions include: J'en rve (Dream on) at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France (2005); Out There, at the Sainsbury Center of Visual Arts, Norwich, UK (2005) and Transition and Transformation at Fine Art Galleries, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (2005). In 2003 her works were exhibited in How Latitudes Become Forms, Curated by Philippe Vergne with Douglas Fogle and Olukemi Ilesanmi for The Walker Center, Minneapolis.

Ranjani Shettar lives and works in Bangalore, India.

Ranjani Shettar