Alwar Balasubramaniam
Alwar Balasubramaniam | Light makes Dark, 2003
Acrylic on canvas, soot in an artist frame
Transitions and Transformations, curated by Loretta Yarlow, Director, brings together for the first time the work of Ranjani Shettar and A. Balasubramaniam, two leading young artists from Bangalore, India. Their work, in common, explores boundaries between personal and cosmic dimensions, between physicality and immateriality, the man-made and the natural, and between tradition and modernity. Formally their work combines light and shadow, and is both amorphous and contained. Above all, their work offers metaphors that concretize a belief in the cyclical nature of things.
Ranjani Shettar creates sculptural installations that refer obliquely to the effects of the burgeoning urbanscape in which she lives. By using a wide range of materials from the organic (such as beeswax, cotton, terra cotta, and lacquered wood) to the industrial (PVC pipes, plastic sheeting), Shettar evokes the present collision of high-tech Bangalore with its rural surroundings.
"By using a wide range of materials from the organic (such as beeswax, cotton, terra cotta, and lacquered wood) to the industrial (PVC pipes, plastic sheeting), Shettar evokes the present collision of high-tech Bangalore with its rural surroundings."
Ranjani Shettar | Container and Content 2, 2000 (Detail)
Sawdust, steel mesh, hay, synthetic resin, string, lime
39″ x 48″ x 64″
For her exhibition at the University Museum of Contemporary Art, Shettar will exibit a new work, Hoomalae (2004), derived from a Kannada language idiom translated as "Gods rained flowers", which continues her investigation with the relationship between the processed and the natural. A sculpture resembling a three-dimensional drawing, it is a net-like curtain consisting of threads joined together by hand-molded colored beeswax traversing in twirling rhythms between the ceiling and the floor. Its scintillating webbed structure suggests cobwebs and constellations, as well as global Internet connections.
Her other work on view, Container and Content (2000-05), seen for the first time in the U.S., is a sculptural investigation of the concept of containment and shelter. It sets up a dichotomy between archetypal structures found in nature (such as the homes of insects, birds, plants and seeds) and industrially processed forms.
Ranjani Shettar was born in 1977 in Bangalore, India. Her work is currently included in the Walker Art Center's traveling exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms and the Wexner Art Center's exhibition Landscape Confection. She is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York.
"Through its implicit immateriality, his work merges intellectual, emotional, and spiritual concerns and invokes some of the fundamental tenets of Hinduism and Buddhism regarding the fusion of the self and the cosmos."
Alwar Balasubramaniam | Golden Thorn, 2004
20 karat gold and acrylic
26″ x 16″ x 3″
Transition and transformation, time and change, also mark the work of A. Balasubramaniam. A life-sized figure that seems to pass through a gallery wall (Self in Progress, 2002), a self-portrait cast in an opaque waxy substance that vanishes over time (Untitled, 2004), a drawing that measures the duration of an entire day by means of a slow-burning fuse (Dawn to dawn, 2004), and a slender branch of thorns cast in solid gold (Golden Thorn, 2004) all speak of the artist's quest for the ungraspable. Through its implicit immateriality, his work merges intellectual, emotional, and spiritual concerns and invokes some of the fundamental tenets of Hinduism and Buddhism regarding the fusion of the self and the cosmos.
Trained as a painter and printmaker and self-taught as a sculptor, A. Balasubramaniam was born in 1971 in Tamil Nadu, India. He has participated in various exhibitions in India, Spain, Poland, Korea, Japan, Finland, and Germany. His work is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York.
