Lot 112: Untitled

Sudarshan Shetty (B. 1961)
Untitled
Fiber-glass, textile and mixed media
14 1/8 x 17 7/8 x 8 in. (36 x 45.5 x 20.5 cm.)
Executed 1991-1992.

Sudarshan Shetty plays with both the childlike and the macabre in his artwork. Trained as a painter at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai, Shetty's oeuvre moved towards sculpture and installation works in the late 1980s inspired partially by a fellowship at the Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad, where he first experimented with stone, bronze and fiberglass. His early sculptures consist of illogical groupings of oversized children's toys precariously balanced upon one another in compositions that are both whimsical and sinister. Similar to the work of American artist Richard Serra, who balances colossal steel plates against one another in arrangements threatening dangerous and imminent collapse, Shetty places the front hooves of a huge bull perilously on one end of a rocking horse in his 1998 work entitled Home. Commenting on his work, Shetty states "I am interested in the idea of absence, a human absence, of being elsewhere. I think most of us are condemned to be elsewhere: I embrace this predicament and rejoice in it." Shetty further elaborates, "The juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous objects - fruits and rusted blades - results in a coming together of a new meaning; even a kind of poetry, which at times I do not grasp. It's not important to understand a work of art. What is more important is a sense of relationship with it, as uncomfortable as it may be. My imagery stems from the spoken language, a word or a phrase. This allows me to sidestep my role as image maker. Perhaps this is what unsettles the viewer and introduces an edgy note into the process of viewing. It is important to challenge modes of viewer-ship." (From S. Shetty & Anupa Mehta, "The Presence of Absence", Verve Online: Life and Soul, Vol. 12, Issue 5, Nov-Dec, 2004. www.verveonline.com/31/life/sudarshan/full.shtml)

The convergence of a childlike curiosity with a sinister presence is seen again in the current example, executed in 1991-92. Placing a disembodied head on a pillow, Shetty summons both images of dreams and of nightmares. The added element of water to the small cavity in the pillow further emphasizes the artist's surreal and disenchanting world.