Important Notice

“I feel great joy in handling the medium. You cannot make anybody understand that joy. Only the person who creates can understand.”
- HIMMAT SHAH

Himmat Shah cut his teeth under the stalwart influence of the abstract modernism of N S Bendre and K G Subramanyan’s artistic philosophy which championed folk art traditions. However, he did not feel compelled to make himself part of an established artistic tradition. As a young artist... “I feel great joy in handling the medium. You cannot make anybody understand that joy. Only the person who creates can understand.”
- HIMMAT SHAH

Himmat Shah cut his teeth under the stalwart influence of the abstract modernism of N S Bendre and K G Subramanyan’s artistic philosophy which championed folk art traditions. However, he did not feel compelled to make himself part of an established artistic tradition. As a young artist he formed Group 1890 along with Jagdish Swaminathan, Jyoti Bhatt, Jeram Patel and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh among others. While the significant collective only held one show, Shah’s work continues to aim “precisely at the destruction” of realism and doctrinal folklore and “at the invention, or the discovery of another reality-perhaps the true one hidden under appearances” as the poet Octavio Paz wrote in the introduction to the group’s sole exhibition. (Octavio Paz, “Surrounded by Infinity…,” Group 1890, New Delhi: Group 1890, 1963)

Krishen Khanna, who for a time worked in a studio next to Himmat Shah’s in Garhi, Rajasthan, describes it “as more like a magician’s cave than a conventional studio.” Shah’s investment in the materiality of the sculpture-making process manifests itself in his involvement in even fashioning his own tools for his practice, ranging from scalpels, rollers, sieves to hammers and plumb lines. This gives his studio a special mood according to Khanna. “There’s an air of expectancy, of something in the making, something about to be, and surely all the things which have been made were events in this silent concert of seemingly inconsequential things converted by his alchemy of love.” (Krishen Khanna, “Himmat Shah,” Critical Collective, online) Art critic Geeta Kapur remarks upon the suggestion of human labour that marks Shah’s sculptures alongside the larger abstract themes they approach. “As much as Himmat works with the metaphorical, he introduces, through the process of his work, fragments of civilisation, the trace of the human hand, cycles of possession and dispossession of objects meant for use and pleasure.” (Geeta Kapur, “The Bohemian as Hermit,” Mumbai: Art India Magazine Vol. V Issue II, 2000, p. 62)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site