Sudarshan Shetty

Born 1961 in Mangalore, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India Sudarshan Shetty is particularly well known for his large-scale sculptures and installations. His work takes its point of departure in a lyrical world full of playfulness and freedom, unfettered by political questions. Through everyday-like fragments he presents a fascinating combination of the representational and the abstract that reveals different facets of modern society. In addition to this, Shetty often employs simple, subtle distortions in his works, e.g. distortions of scale. In so doing, he breaks down conventions and creates new ideals in an attempt at counteracting existing systems. Shetty has always worked with the concept of boundaries within the realms of the personal, the psychological, the social, and the carnal. He uses specially selected materials to celebrate and define such boundaries and their inevitable demise. Shetty’s early paintings, later installations, and most recent kinetic sculptural assemblages all evince a keen interest in the macabre, the playful, and the seductive. But just as his works consistently evoke emotional responses in his audiences, his works are also contemplative and insightful. In the monumental work Untitled from 2006 he shows a mechanical sculptural installation that animates the cow. In India the cow is regarded as sacred. It is a symbol of goodness, fertility, and the feminine; a kind of mother goddess for the Hindu. Some Indian states even have a ban against slaughtering cows and oxen. Shetty’s sculpture consists of two life-sized skeletal cows, their hooves placed on top of each other. The sculpture was created in connection with a series of works entitled Love, which investigates the phenomenon of love as something that is at turns comical, ironic, and perverse. In Shetty’s works the cows are quite literally naked – cut to the bone. At the same time, they pretend to be making love even though they cannot possibly move. However, the act of physical love taking place between the cows strikes us as neither insistent nor provocative, precisely because the placing of the cows does not facilitate it. The work also turns love into something mechanical: If a spectator passes too closely by the sculpture, the movement sets off a hammer that strikes the udder of one of the cows. To Shetty the main issue does not concern seeing and experiencing the work of art as an aesthetic object; rather, it has to do with how machines and objects in the world have a fleeting, ephemeral quality. In the work he demonstrates an interest in the cow as a national and historical symbol, as something with a jester-like potential for the comically sublime. His inappropriate interventions against the familiar posit his works in a changeable interspace located somewhere between universally shared frames of reference and intimate, private experiences. Stine Kleis Hansen

Sudarshan Shetty Untitled (Double Cow from the show Love), 2006