Himmat Shah (1933-2025): A modernist who engaged with the spirit of the material

Artist Himmat Shah brought a certain intensity to any medium that he worked with, be it his bronze sculptures, drawings or burnt paper collages. He continued to be prolific well into his 90s, creating drawings during the covid-19 pandemic, which revealed the inner workings of his mind. Some of these were shown as part of the show, Ninety and After: Excursions of a Free Imagination, presented by Anant Art Gallery at the Bikaner House, New Delhi, last year. Roobina Karode, director and chief curator, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), who was the special adviser to this show, called these drawings, “labyrinths of the mind, a graphic puzzle, if you will, that defy deciphering.” 

The artist, aged 91, passed away on Sunday morning in Jaipur, and since then tributes have been pouring in from across the art ecosystem. Mamta Singhania, founder-director, Anant Art Gallery, feels that the passing of Himmat Bhai—as he was fondly called—leaves a deep chasm that is impossible to describe in words. “Over two decades, I have had the privilege of witnessing his unwavering dedication, his boundless curiosity, and his ability to breathe life into clay. He was someone of rare conviction—playful, precise, and always searching. His work carried a deep philosophical and material understanding, shaped by his belief that modernism was a leap from the familiar to the unknown,” she says.

Artist G.R. Iranna, whose association with the artist goes back to 1993 when both were working in Garhi Studios, Delhi, calls him ‘the sculptor of India’. For him, Shah was equally a mentor, teacher and a good friend. Iranna recalls his kindness and generosity to young art practitioners such as himself. 

The KNMA, which presented three major exhibitions of his work—most significant of these being the retrospective Hammer on the Square in 2016—released a statement earlier this week mourning the passing of Shah. “Embracing the ‘emancipatory disposition of art’, Shah developed a distinct visual language that drew from local traditions while pushing the boundaries of form and medium. His prolific oeuvre—spanning drawings, burnt-paper collages,  silver relief paintings, ceramics, and sculptures in terracotta and bronze—reflects both experimental rigor and poetic sensitivity,” the statement reads. 

Also read: Three shows, one city and a new look at old masters

The artist was born in 1933 in Lothal, Gujarat, where he was exposed to terracotta art and other objects from the Indus Valley Civilisation found in excavations by archaeologists. Curator-art historian Gayatri Sinha mentions in the book, An Unreasoned Act of Being: New Sculptures by Himmat Shah (Mapin Publishing, 2007), about how the artist would escape to the Girnar Forests as a mark of protest after some of the family land was appropriated when the Harappan site became institutionalised. He would often be found painting images of Ram in a temple within a Junagadh goshala—and would also sell an occasional drawing. 

His family finally sent him to the Gharshala, or the home school of Dakshinamurty, which followed  Gandhian philosophy and an open system of education. From there, Shah headed to the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University, Baroda from 1956 to 1960, where he came under the influence of both N.S. Bendre and K.G. Subramanyan. In 1967, he received a French Government scholarship to study etching at Atelier 17, Paris. 

The 1960s were a significant period for Shah, marked by deep influences and turns in his practice. During this time, he came to Delhi and met artist J. Swaminathan—and together with 10 other young artists such as Jeram Patel, Raghav Kanera, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Balkrishna Patel and Jyoti Bhatt, they co-founded Group 1890, a short-lived yet influential collective in 1962. The idea was to step away from the focus on Western modernism in Indian art and “envisage a new world of experience with greater freedom, challenging the notion of art needing to represent or challenge reality,” as mentioned in the group’s manifesto, which was adopted in 1963. 

At the only exhibition ever held by the group at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, in the very same year, Shah showed his burnt paper collages, which made quite an impression. The next year, in another exhibition, he showed his drawings, which exhibited a primaeval sort of intensity that came to mark his work from thereon. His engagement with the act of drawing was a constant—a thread that ran through his practice. The act of drawing held a special place for him—they were not drafts or preparatory sketches for his sculptures but independent works in their own right. “He just picks up a pen, pencil, graphite or ink and just plunges into a space. And in that very space, he keeps on creating and drawing—and these works acquire their own internal logic and rhythm,” Karode, a close friend of Shah’s, had stated in an interview to Lounge during the opening of the show Ninety and After. 

Also read: ‘Lines of Flight’: Shilpa Gupta examines borders in her first solo in West Asia

In his early years he would not just draw on paper but on surfaces such as stone, clay and plaster. One can find these indentations on his terracotta heads. “Even his bronze sculptures manifest textural accents and mingling of architectural and sculptural elements, where the organic and geometric exude an enigmatic quality. The sculptures resonate with his drawings, sharing an inner spirit,” she had added. In recent years, with age catching up—leaving him with less strength for making sculptures—he would spend a considerable time contemplating drawing. The works done in the last few years exhibit a certain vulnerability—the intensity is still there in its spontaneous bursts, only now it carries a certain softer poetic feel to it. 

Whichever material Shah worked with, he immersed himself in it completely. Between 1967 and 1971, he designed murals in brick and concrete at the St Xavier’s School, Ahmedabad. Shah also started working with relief and sculpture in plaster, terracotta and ceramics. “Shah’s sculptures in bronze and terracotta explore materiality, texture and the various ways in which reality can be presented. They internalize the built-in obsolescence of consumerist society. His gilded objects of clay have the traces of paintings on them and there are unreadable hieroglyphs gouged into his series of metal heads. These are self-mocking elements, speaking of age and decay,” states an essay on the auction house Saffronart’s website. 

For a long period, Shah worked out of Garhi artist studios in New Delhi. In the book, An Unreasoned Act of Being, Sinha quotes artist Krishen Khanna, who also worked out of the Garhi Studios. He describes Shah’s workplace in the 1980s as a storehouse of found objects, which had outgrown their use and had made their way to junkyards and the rubbish heap. “...all resuscitated and given a new status, coexisting happily with clay, plaster, pigments, chemicals,” Khanna states in the book. “It is more like a magician’s cave than a conventional studio.” 

According to art historian and curator R. Siva Kumar, usually there is a certain continuity between the various phases of an artist’s life. However, in Shah’s case, he was unpredictable in the turns that he took. And that made him stand out. “The ordinariness of his materials came from very deprived conditions that he worked in. His economic success as an artist came later in life. The time that he was staying in Garhi was a difficult one. He used material that he could lay his hands on,” he says. Yet there was a subtle sensitivity to the way he thought things through. The work from that period really stands out for the way he transformed material. “Shah was creating imagery, which other sculptors were not doing at the time. He didn’t subscribe to any kind of pre-given visual language, and he could reimagine the possibilities of materials with great subtlety. This was noticeable across all his works—be it burnt paper collages or his early mural, wherein the materials that went into the building of the walls also became the material of his work. He was extremely sensitive to surfaces and textures. That made him a really special artist,” elaborates R. Siva Kumar.

Also read: In a new exhibition, photographer Gauri Gill brings the highway into the gallery

Shah was completely immersed in the act of creating art. For him, it was not the final artwork that was significant but the process itself. Those who knew him well were well-aware of the reverence with which he treated this process. This immersion in media and material was unique to Shah. In the years at Garhi artist studios, when there was no money for bronze or other expensive material, he created his signature terracotta heads. “One could see that clay was Himmat Bhai and Himmat Bhai was clay. He played with it—the fact that it was organic, close to the human body and extremely relatable appealed to him,” says Iranna, who would often observe Shah in Garhi and participate in the process as well. He recalls how the artist would keep experimenting, and constantly question himself and Iranna as well. He recalls Shah saying that art can never be taught, rather you have to find it. “He would say art is like an ocean—the amount of what that you draw from it depends on you. I have never met someone like Himmat Bhai. Such an artist comes about once in ages, and it will take another set of ages to find someone like him again,” says Iranna.