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Lot 75

 

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“...In my heads you will see there is both fragility and transience of existence, the heightened relationship between different layers. Sculpture for me is about an intense connect and understanding of the materials and material world, and echoes of lost civilisations and cultures.” - HIMMAT SHAH (Artist quoted in Uma Nair, "Solitude Was My Constant Companion, Says Sculptor Himmat Shah," The Hindu, 29 March 2019, online)

Himmat... “...In my heads you will see there is both fragility and transience of existence, the heightened relationship between different layers. Sculpture for me is about an intense connect and understanding of the materials and material world, and echoes of lost civilisations and cultures.” - HIMMAT SHAH (Artist quoted in Uma Nair, "Solitude Was My Constant Companion, Says Sculptor Himmat Shah," The Hindu, 29 March 2019, online)

Himmat Shah’s sculptures hint at the perplexing and vulnerable nature of the object-world that he first began to engage with in his homeland Lothal, Gujarat, where the highest objects and artefacts dating back to the Indus Valley Civilisation were excavated. “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,” ART India Magazine, Vol. V, Issue II, 2000, p. 62)

Shah’s most celebrated works are his sculptures of heads that explored materiality, representation of form, process, and metaphor. It was in the mid-1970s that he began executing sculptures in direct plaster along with many experiments in technique. Some of his earliest plaster heads were immersed into linseed oil for the form to harden and then overlaid with silver-foil. “From the mid-1980s Himmat’s work took on the look it bears until today – an array of heads and object-forms in plaster, ceramic and terracotta, sometimes enveloped with silver and gold-leaf that gives them the aspect of icons, shrines and votive objects.” (Kapur, p. 62) He went on to extensively use terracotta and bronze, though never ceasing to play with other mediums. The present lot, elongated and four-faceted, is one such sculptural head that gives precedence to form over narrative, questioning the notions of beauty and appearance that pushes the viewer to question art and existence as they know and experience them.

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