Every aspect of Ranjani Shettar’s artistic practice is rooted in the natural world. Her studio, where she often works out of doors, is located in rural Karnataka in India. That local context is important since she draws on established craft traditions to find the tools and techniques that might be adapted to contemporary sculpture.
Installations by the Indian sculptor hover harmoniously amid plant life — but with a warning about our need to respect the environment.
Brutalist architecture and an expansive urban jungle form the context for Shettar’s thoughtful and handcrafted sculptures.
Floating forms unfurl in Ranjani Shettar’s sculptural installation, Cloud songs on the horizon, responding both to the wildness of the conservatory’s planting and the surrounding Brutalist structure, writes Nyima Murry.
Ranjani Shettar’s ‘Cloud songs on the horizon’ suspends sculptures amid the Barbican Conservatory’s plant life.
The Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar has been commissioned to respond to the space and she does so brilliantly. Using steel armatures cloaked in stained muslin cloth, Shettar has created sculptures that evoke fruits and seeds, insects and perhaps human forms, while remaining defiantly abstract.
Arriving at the Barbican Centre’s Conservatory space to experience the sculptural work of Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar, Cindy Huang gets lost within an ever-overgrowing jungle, leading to thoughts on post-colonial reimaginings of the botanical space.
Kartik Sood’s solo debut in the US, “Elusive Spaces,” is an achievement of aching delicacy. Semitransparent, often partial renderings of human figures hover amid smoky forests and haunting crepuscular interiors.
Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, France
In that moment: Artist Kartik Sood is creating waves with his painting exhibition at Talwar Gallery in New York. It showcases works created during the pandemic, besides other recent creations. As an artist who spent long hours in the studio, the lockdown wasn’t so “radical” for him, but he could see the shift around.
April 3 – June 4, 2023
Celebrating India’s diverse culture and traditions through the works of contemporary Indian and global artists, ‘Sangam/Confluence’ marks the opening of the ARTHOUSE at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) and celebrates India’s diverse cultural impulses and traditions. The inaugural exhibition curated by Ranjit Hoskote and Jeffrey Deitch include amongst others works by Cecily Brown, Lynda Benglis, Ranjani Shettar and Bhupen Khakhar.
The Institute of Arab & Islamic Art has inaugurated its new space in Manhattan’s West Village with the first (and long overdue) U.S. presentation of Rummana Hussain (1952-1999), a pioneer of India’s conceptual and performance scene.
In her recent solo show, “Just like that,” Sheila Makhijani’s ongoing romance with line and color took on a pared-down, simplified form. Soft powdery blues and pinks, reminiscent of sunsets in the monsoon season, dominate the top rows, giving way to horizontal panels of lemony and mango tones before finally descending into darker shades of earthy and muddy browns.
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Al-An deSouza has created art across various mediums for more than three decades, examining and embodying transnationality in spite of racism and colonialism
Rummana Hussain (1952-1999), one of India’s pioneer conceptual and performance artists, was born a secular Muslim into a well-placed political family in Bangalore. She began her career as a painter but her burgeoning political activism prompted her to expand her formal range. Feminism was a shaping force. So was the explosion of anti-Muslim violence by Hindu nationalists in 1992. Together they pushed her to make work that spun from her identity as a member of two embattled minorities.
Al-An deSouza’s experiments in photography routinely challenge everyday notions of the photograph as recording a fixed moment in time or providing reliable access to the past. This exhibition combines three recent photographic series—Flotsam (1926–2018), Elegies for Futures Past (and other Fugue States), and Anthology—with an earlier series, The Lost Pictures, in ways that question such notions about photography in relation to family memory, diasporic identity, and the broader sweep of historical change linked to colonial empire and its ongoing repercussions.
Women Painting Women is a thematic exhibition featuring 46 female artists who choose women as subject matter in their works. This presentation includes approximately 50 evocative portraits that span the late 1960s to the present. International in scope, Women Painting Women recognizes female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of postwar figuration. Painting is the focus of the exhibition, as traditionally it has been a privileged medium for portraiture, particularly for white male artists.
The artist’s new photographic series, “Flotsam,” at Talwar is similarly time-traveling and memorial in function. (The works are not documentary photographs but digital paintings based on a photographic original.) In this case, the pictures are of material possessions left behind by deSouza’s father after his death in 2018...
On view
The artists and artworks presented in Individuals, Networks, Expressions form a complex web of connections. Together, they create a story of visual art that unfolds across time and intertwines individual and shared experiences. At the centre of this web is Asia, a geographic designation and a broad cultural space that informs a spectrum of identities, histories, and perspectives.
The exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction with works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s. Far from being a mere catalogue, the exhibition reveals the decisive turning points that marked this development, the specific contexts for creation, the research conducted by the artists, individually or in groups, as well as the founding exhibitions.
Another Energy focuses on 16 female artists in their 70s or older, from across the globe, who continue to embark on new challenges. Showcasing their wide array of powerful works from paintings, video, sculptures, to large-scale installations and performances, this exhibition contemplates the nature of the special strength - “Another Energy” - of these women who have all continued challenging throughout their long-standing careers.
The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, celebrates its centennial with Seeing Differently. The exhibition marks the first major celebration of the museum’s permanent collection in over 10 years and includes works by Paul Klee, Mondrian, Rothko, Pollock, Picasso, de Kooning, Calder, Jacob Lawrence and Ranjani Shettar amongst others...
An enigmatic figure sits cross-legged in a meditative pose in the middle of a circle in N. N. Rimzon’s sculpture The Round Ocean and the Living Death, 2019–20, which lent its intriguing title to the artist’s most recent exhibition. The statue’s nose and closed eyes are vermilion, offering a vivid contrast to its grayish body...
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art turns ten this year. We celebrate the past decade, bringing back vignettes that will highlight the museum’s multi-focal vision, its evolving mission, directions and journeys undertaken, mapping intersecting histories of the subcontinent.
Anjum Singh has transformed personal afflictions to a more universal level of human experience in her layered images
Migrating Worlds brings together work by eight of Britain’s leading film and video artists in the first exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art dedicated exclusively to the moving image.
An interview of Alwar Balasubramaniam with Chitra Balasubramaniam of Sculpture Magazine.
Earth Songs for a Night Sky is a multi-faceted project by Ranjani Shettar. Occupying two rooms and the staircase of the original Phillips House, the project is conceived in dialogue with Wassily Kandinsky’s artist’s book Klänge (Sounds)—which features 56 woodcuts and was published right after he had made his breakthrough into abstraction—and Klee’s late paintings in the Phillips’s collection, including Arab Song (1932), Efflorescence (1937), and Figure of the Oriental Theater (1934).
Unhinged by events of 1992-93, Rummana embarked on a courageous pursuit to excavate the marginalization of the other, their means and sustenance. Now, over 25 years after they were first created by the artist they still resonate with renewed vigor, except what were local origins at the time are now pervasive around the globe, abundant in echoes of intolerance to secularism and self.
In Sheila Makhijani’s exhibition “This That and The Other,” a disarray of strange, vibrant objects lies before the viewer, as if they were artifacts from some underwater civilization revealed by the ebb. The glazed and unglazed ceramics...
Arpita Singh is one of the most significant women artists in India. This retrospective exhibition at KNMA gives an extraordinary opportunity to view six decades of her art practice.
Usually composed of numerous nonrepresentational forms, Ranjani Shettar’s immersive environments are inspired by her observations of the now-threatened natural environs of her native India.
You Remind Me of Someone relies on mechanisms triggered by resemblance, mimicry, and reciprocity in order to explore our relationship to images in a world in which they multiply endlessly on a daily basis. The visual and gestural similarities between the works question affinities, elicit encounters, seek to find a common thread in this continuous flux.
DeSouza’s most recent work reenacts and upends iconic colonial narratives of discovery in Africa.
One of the most significant artists to emerge in post-Independence India, Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) created a body of work that demonstrates a singular and sustained engagement with abstraction. The Met Breuer exhibition, the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, is an important part of the Met’s initiative to explore and present the global scope of modern and contemporary art.
The Van Every/Smith Galleries and Davidson College are pleased to present Contents Under Pressure, featuring the works of Allan deSouza and Alia Syed.
Time / Image explores the interrelationship of time and thought in contemporary art. The exhibition borrows its title and, loosely, its philosophical framework from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995).
Nasreen Mohamedi was one of the first Indian artists to embrace abstraction, moving away from the more conventional doctrines of Indian modern art in the early decades of the 20th century. The exhibition, organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, displays her work – combining thought and action – in the intersections between her life and her art.
Nasreen Mohamedi reveals the artist’s significant contribution to modernism that expands the boundaries of Western art history and offers an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of abstract art. Featuring more than 50 of her works, Nasreen Mohamedi charts the evolution of Mohamedi’s work, exploring how she, like Mondrian, moved away from a figurative style and developed her own unique approach to abstraction.
In the history of Indian Modernism, Nasreen Mohamedi is a distinct figure who broke away from the mainstream art practice of the early decades of post-Independent India, choosing the less explored trajectory of the 'non-representational'.
The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is the Gallery’s flagship international contemporary art event, and the only major exhibition series in the world to focus exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific and Australia. APT7 continued the series’ forward-thinking approach to questions of geography, history and culture and how these questions are explored through the work of contemporary artists.
Ranjani Shettar’s Varsha, an artist’s book published by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art in late 2012, evokes aspects of 16 phases of the monsoon and the classical Indian astronomy used to predict them. The accordion-folding volume, bound in hand-worked metal, includes 16 original prints, each corresponding to a specific period of the rainy season.
Experimental filmmaker Alia Syed makes her West Coast debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) with an installation of her film Eating Grass.
Ranjani Shettar: Dewdrops and Sunshine showcases the artist’s unique approach to sculpture including material experimentation, relationship to space, engagement with nature, exploration of tradition and resonance with modernism.
Intersections is a series of contemporary art projects that explores—as the title suggests—the intriguing intersections between old and new traditions, modern and contemporary art practices, and museum spaces and artistic interventions. Whether engaging with the permanent collection or diverse spaces in the museum, the projects suggest new relationships with their own surprises.
NASREEN MOHAMEDI
A. BALASUBRAMANIAM
SHEILA MAKHIJANI
ALIA SYED
RANJANI SHETTAR in
On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century
Unlike many contemporary Indian artists currently exhibiting their work internationally, Shettar has maintained close connections to Bangalore, India, where she was born and educated. Her artistic vocabulary is akin to those of postminimalist artists such as Martin Puryear and Eva Hesse, insofar as she explores a variety of materials and displays an interest in both handwork and the conceptual dimensions of art objects.
More than forty years have passed since minimalist artists first began incorporating the space of the gallery into their artistic work, but the impact of sculpture that reflects the inherent possibilities and limitations of its setting has hardly diminished. This practice is fundamental to the work of the artist Ranjani Shettar, although her focus is not solely on the display environment or even the notion of sculpture as it is understood in this realm.
The work of the English artist of Indian descent Alia Syed (Swansea, United Kingdom) is on display for the first time in Spain at this exhibition. Her work Eating Grass (2003), is a succession of sequences in public and private spaces of three cities (London, Karachi and Lahore), assembled as a collage.
Ranjani Shettar creates large-scale, abstract sculpture by combining manmade and natural materials such as wood, beeswax, cloth, thread, rubber, PVC pipe, wire, steel, and beads. Her works, which appear to be as impulsive and random as they are patterned and logical, are frequently arranged as sculptural installations that interact with and articulate the space around them.
Third Triennial opens at Guangdong Museum of Art and its satellite museum, Time Museum, consisting of 181 artists from over 40 countries. The curators GAO Shiming, Sarat MAHARAJ and Johnson CHANG Tsong-zung brought together artists that examine the limits of multi-culturalism in a post-Colonial era and the effects on contemporary art production.
Known as one of the preeminent international surveys of contemporary art, the International was founded simultaneously with the Carnegie Museum at the behest of Andrew Carnegie. It has consistently been among the most innovative and challenging exhibitions of contemporary art-the only regularly scheduled global survey in North America, and the only one presented in a museum.
The artist's first solo presentation in a U.S. museum will feature a new work entitled Sun-sneezers blow light bubbles. The suspended sculpture made with steel, tamarind kernel powder and muslin, and fashioned into organic shapes reminiscent of soap bubbles, containers of light, or multiplying cells hanging throughout the gallery, creates an immersive, ethereal environment.
Documenta 12 investigates three questions: is modernity our antiquity, what is bare life, and what is to be done (concerning education)? Artistic Director Roger Buergel and Curator Ruth Noack sensitively address these issues with all conceivable media, very few art star names, and work form diverse countries.
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego | March 4 - July 16, 2007
Vancouver Art Gallery | October 4, 2008 - January 11, 2009
The first comprehensive exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, Wack! focuses on 1965 to 1980, during which the majority of feminist activism and art-marking occurred in North America. Comprising work in a broad range of media, the exhibition considers geography, formal concerns, and collective aesthetic and political impulses. Curated by Connie Butler.
Freeing the Line, curated by Catherine de Zegher, considers the departure of the line from the paper and into space, juxtaposing "drawings without paper" (as Gego titled them)-works made of wire and thread by artist in the late sixties and early seventies-with contemporary drawings.
International Center of Photography, New York | March 10 - My 28, 2006
Miami Art Central, Miami, FL | June 29 - August 17, 2006
Museo Tamayo, Mexico City | February 14 - May 6, 2007
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN | February 29 - May 25, 2008
An exhibition of some of the most forceful propositions by contemporary artists and photographers on how to look at Africa.
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH | January 29 - May 1, 2005
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX | July 23, 2005 - September 11, 2005
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA | February 5 - May 7, 2006
This exhibition brings together the work of thirteen artists expanding the boundaries of traditional landscape painting. They embrace the decorative and blur distinctions between art and craft, using materials and techniques that range far beyond paint on canvas.
Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Germany | July 24 - November 7, 2004
Hayward Gallery, London, UK | February 10 - April 17, 2005
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France | May 25 - August 8, 2005
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan | May 27 - August 31, 2006
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN | October 11, 2003 - January 11, 2004
Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA | February 8 - May 9, 2004
Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Spain | May 28 - September 19, 2004
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland | November 19, 2004 - February 20, 2005
Miami Art Center, Miami, FL | March 11 - June 12, 2005