Every Man in his Humour

It takes time to understand his works,the repetitive use of red and white liquid usually representing blood and semen respectively,scissors,the skeleton of a dog and the Beetle car. His work,Six Drops stands for the six enemies within according to Indian mythology. His famous House of Shades,commissioned by Louis Vuitton,is a masterpiece as is his mechanical installation at New York’s Tilton Gallery titled The More I Die,the Lighter I Get which art critic Ranjit Hoskote describes as “giant toys whose conception of play is as serious as a game of life and death”. “I look for the lost body inside,” Shetty says about his use of objects that acquire a life of their own,being alive and futile at the same time.

His mechanical installations,the precise play of his sculptures,too,hold no value,he adds. “They present themselves as spectacles and once they have been displayed,they collapse under their own spectacle,” says Shetty,adding how the objects represent the meaninglessness of the whole situation and he,as a sculptor,is battling this very contradiction through his works.

The city of Mumbai fuels his creativity and he likes to look out of his studio when he’s exploring the realms of art. A JJ School of Art product,Shetty’s artistic thought process was brushed aside in the early days,a time when new media was struggling for survival against the traditional art forms. “It took me time to make a place for my art,” says this commerce graduate who always knew art was his calling. “I have dabbled with advertisement and made portraits of people at a restaurant in Mumbai called Mela,” he recounts.

His idea of an artist being a person who paints film posters was washed away when he joined art school. “It opened a whole new world to me,” says Shetty. Now,he adds,even new media is a thing of the past.

The transition from painting to sculpture marked the coming of age for Shetty. “I have always been fascinated by how things stand,the structural aspect and,in the process,challenge the notion of seriousness of the material,” says the artist. As American comedian and film star Groucho Marx would say,“Before I speak,I have something important to say.