Ranjani Shettar

Ranjani Shettar (born 1977) is a visual artist from Bangalore, India known for her large-scale sculptural installations. Her work has been displayed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Personal life and education
Shettar received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Sculpture in 1998 and a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture in 2000, from the College of Fine Art Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath and the Institute of Advanced Studies Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bangalore, respectively.

Shettar currently lives and works in Karnataka, India.

Career
Shettar’s first exhibition was in 2004 at the Talwar Gallery in New York. Since then, her works have been featured in museums worldwide.

Shettar's works have been the subject of various publications from the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and galleries like the Talwar and Marian Goodman Gallery. Shettar was awarded the Hebbar Foundation award in 1999 and 2003, as well as the Charles Wallace Trust Award in 2004, the Sanskriti award in 2008, and the Aditya Vikram Birla Kalakiran Puraskar in 2011 for her works.

In 2023, Shettar’s first major institutional show in Europe was commissioned by the Barbican Centre in London. Titled "Cloud songs on the horizon," the project features a series of expansive suspended sculptures spanning the Conservatory's space.

Work
In her work, Shettar combines natural and industrial materials, including beeswax, wood, organic dyes, vegetal pastes, lacquer, steel, and cloth, to create large-scale installations. Shettar draws inspiration from India's history of craft traditions, incorporating many of their time-honored techniques into her creative process.



Shettar's hand-carved wood sculptures involve deliberate preservation of the natural textures of the material.



Shettar’s woodwork also exists as wall-mounted compositions. One example is Touch Me Not (2006-2007), now a permanent part of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art's collection.



Shettar has created an immersive installations, such as Seven Ponds and a Few Rain Drops (2017), which entered the permanent collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. Other examples include Sing Along (2008-2009), now in the collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

Shettar has also created works connecting hand-molded wax beads with cotton thread. In her work Just a bit more (2005-2006), which is now in the permanent collection of MoMA New York, the artist really relied on the lightweight and translucent quality of the material to create an intricate web of threads.



In addition to organic mediums, Shettar also uses industrial materials. One such piece, Me, No, Not Me, Buy Me, Eat Me, Wear Me, Have Me, Me, No, Not Me (2006-2007) was featured at the inaugural exhibition of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's sculptural garden.

Shettar's projects are mostly sculptural, however she has experimented in other forms as well. One such project is Varsha, an artist's book in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art (New York). In 2021, Shettar was invited to create a special print titled Alae alae to commemorate The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 150th anniversary.