“Nobody has asked me for an autograph yet. I am not so famous,” chuckles the Mumbai-based artist sitting in the gallery amidst his art works. With “Every Broken Moment Piece By Piece” Sudarshan returns to Delhi after a gap of 10 years. While Mumbai and the world kept witnessing his monumental installations — a metallic dinosaur, a 9000-kg flying bus, a giant rocking horse, mating buffaloes, etc. — the city where he first showed in 2003, and interestingly where his first solo show “Paper Moon” (held in 1995 in Mumbai), was born, missed out on them. And even when he is back, it’s an understated and subtle Sudarshan Shetty and not a bizarre and whacky Sudarshan Shetty.

“It may seem like a very quiet show but one of the most intensive gallery shows of my life. Monumentality doesn’t necessarily mean scale. Smaller, quieter works can be equally gigantic in terms of idea and concept. In this case, I didn’t work to make it apparently spectacular. I wanted it to be spectacular in its experience and labour. It took us one month to make this ten-minute video. Mapping the cracks in the broken cups and saucers with wood was just so much work,” says the artist who exhibits a collection of nine wooden sculptures, mixed-media pieces, and a video work.

Broken crockery that has been rebuilt, commemorative statues affixed with a glass of water, old pieces of wooden doors used in a modern way in a shrine-like structure and other pieces hint at the times gone, by but the artist isn’t lamenting the loss. “There is an old saying that broken ceramic can never be mended. It’s futile trying to redo it, but I attempt this extreme situation of bringing something back to life. And when I do it, new forms emerge,” he explains adding there is a certain kind of continuity in the concerns he is occupied with. “My signature style shouldn’t be read into the scale of the work but what it represents.”