Ranjani Shettar

Ranjani Shettar was born in 1977 in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. She earned a BFA in Sculpture in 1998 and an MFA in Sculpture in 2000, both from the College of Fine Art at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bangalore. Her practice centers on large-scale sculptural installations that combine natural materials, including wood, stone, beeswax, and hand-dyed thread, with industrial materials such as steel and lacquer, drawing on traditional Indian craft techniques and ecological themes.

She has been represented for two decades by Talwar Gallery, which operates in New York and New Delhi. Shettar was long based in Bangalore and now divides her time between a rural studio near Sagara, in the Shivamogga district of Karnataka, and a city studio in Bangalore. Her work has been shown in a solo presentation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018, titled Seven ponds and a few raindrops, and included in the Museum of Modern Art's group exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. She showed at SFMOMA in 2009 and at the Barbican Centre in London in 2023 to 2024. In 2026 she represents India at the National Pavilion of India at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. She continues to live and work in Karnataka, India.

Institutional attention has been the primary channel through which Shettar's reputation has been built, rather than a sustained run of critical commentary in the general press. Museum programming, from SFMOMA's 2009 New Work presentation through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2018 solo installation and the Barbican's 2023 to 2024 exhibition, has consistently framed her work around the fusion of traditional Indian craft with industrial materials and around ecological and environmental themes expressed through organic, suspended forms. Her selection to represent India at the 2026 Venice Biennale extends that institutional trajectory into the highest tier of international recognition available to a living artist.

The highest recorded auction price for a work by Ranjani Shettar is USD 100,000, paid for Remanence from Last Night's Dream, a rosewood and lacquered wood sculpture executed in 2011, at Christie's New York's South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art sale on 21 March 2013. Christie's described the result as a world auction record for the artist. No higher public sale has been documented since. Her secondary market remains very thin, with few works having come to auction, so this single result is best read as one data point rather than the start of a price trend.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Shettar's work, and verification runs through Talwar Gallery, her longtime representative in New York and New Delhi. Her auction history is sparse: a single confirmed high-value result from 2013 is the only clear public benchmark, so collectors should treat any pricing comparison with caution and weight museum exhibition history and gallery provenance more heavily than trailing auction data. The gap between her museum standing and the depth of her public sale record is the central fact to understand before transacting.