Sudarshan Shetty was born in 1961 and currently lives and works in Mumbai. Trained as a painter at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Shetty subsequently turned to sculpture and installation as his primary mediums. As a conceptual artist, he is renowned for enigmatic, mixed media works that celebrate the fusion of Indian and Western traditions. His practice carefully juxtaposes materials and objects belonging to vastly distinct cultures to create compositions that are at once familiar and uncanny.
Having exhibited widely around the world, Shetty has had solo exhibitions in institutions and galleries that include the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka), Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (Mumbai), National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi), Galerie Daniel Templon (Brussels), Galerie Krinzinger (Vienna) and GALLERY SKE (New Delhi and Bangalore). He has participated in innumerable group shows in museums that include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning), Gem Museum for Contemporary Art (The Hague), Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (Beijing), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Tel Aviv) and Kiran Nader Museum of Art (New Delhi). He has also participated in a number of significant biennales such as the Yinchuan Biennale, the Biennale of Sydney, the Prague Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In 2016, Shetty served as the curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Shetty has been a Ford Foundation Fellow at the New School for General Studies (New York), and a resident at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh). In 1999, he was the only Indian artist commissioned to make a public sculpture in Fukuoka as part of the Hakata Riverain Art Project. His works are a part of a number of public and private art collections including the Devi Art Foundation, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Frank Cohen Museum of Modern Art, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the Vanhaerents Art Collection, and the Ishara Art Foundation and The Prabhakar Collection.