Sudarshan Shetty (b.1961)

Acquired from Tilton Gallery, January 2008

Wolverhampton, Initial Access, Passage to India, 15 March - 2 August 2008

Sudarshan Shetty formally trained as a painter and while gaining recognition for his sculptures, installations and conceptual based work, he returned to the medium of paint on canvas in this poignant series of works that represent loss, fading and decay and have an overall elegiac quality. These themes pervade his body of work in general but here it is highly self-referential. The series emanates from an album of 4 x 6 inch photographs that served as documentation if not memories of installation works that Shetty created early on in his career that have subsequently been destroyed or abandoned. The Volkswagen Beetle toy car serves as a childhood inspiration for the artist and is revisited in several of his later works. In his 2008 installation for the Vancouver Biennial titled, History of Loss, multiple casts of model aluminum Volkswagen Beetle cars are showcased in clear plexiglass boxes stacked in repeated rows that are both coffin-like and representing a childlike desire intermingled with nostalgia, entombed as they are in museum styled cases as a 'modern relic'. Here in this particular painting, is a conscious play on its meta qualities whereby a painting derived from a photograph of a no longer existent work of art is meant to convey a sense of loss. The loss is multiplied not only from the lost work that is here memorialized but from a general sense of impermanence that this multi-layered work imparts with the encased Beetle as its subject matter.