On 2nd February 2025, the world of Indian art and culture lost one of its most beloved, maverick modernists, Himmat Shah. With an eye for sculpting forms out of clay, bronze, concrete, or just about any material that caught his attention, Himmat’s was a life well-lived, on his own terms. Himmat Shah had an illustrious career, friendships forged through the decades, and developed a unique artistic language that resulted from an irrepressible impulse to constantly innovate, thereby opening up unforeseen terrains of creative exploration.
Born in Lothal, Gujarat, in 1933, Himmat moved to Bhavnagar at a young age, where he studied painting under the guidance of Jagubhai Shah at Gharshala, a school that emerged as part of the nationalist renaissance. Later, he joined the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda in 1955 where he was mentored by stalwarts such as N.S. Bendre, K.G. Subramanyan, and Sankho Chaudhuri. Despite not being enrolled in a regular course there, it was in Baroda that he met several of his lifelong peers—Jyoti Bhatt, Raghav Kaneria, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Feroze Katpitia, Nagji Patel, Rajnikant Panchal, Shailesh Dave, and others with whom he exhibited as part of the Baroda Group of Artists.
The 1960s
The early 1960s saw Himmat become part of the short-lived yet legendary Group 1890, an artist collective that wished to push new directions for art. In their one and only exhibition held in 1963 at the Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi, which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Himmat exhibited a set of burnt collages.
Having forged a close friendship with artists J. Swaminathan and Ambadas Khobragade, Himmat exhibited together with them at the Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi, in 1964, the same year and place where he held his first solo exhibition, comprising ink and paper drawings, rendered in a style that was Souza-esque in its angst and machismo.
Between 1966 and 1967, Himmat travelled to Paris on a scholarship from the French government to study etching under the mentorship of Krishna Reddy and Stanley Hayter at Atelier 17. During this time, he exhibited two paintings at the Paris Biennale in 1967. Following his return to India, between 1967 and 1971, he embarked on a landmark project where he designed and executed a monumental high relief mural using brick, cement, and concrete at the St. Xavier's School in Ahmedabad. This pivotal undertaking was initiated through an invitation extended by Himmat’s architect friend, Hasmukh Patel.
At Garhi Artists’ Studio
From 1976 to 2004, Himmat lived and worked in Delhi with a studio at the then-newly established Garhi Artists’ Studio. It was during this time that Himmat worked most extensively in sculpture, with forms that have become emblematic of his practice, such as heads, bottles, and other object-forms. The seamlessness with which he moved across multiple representational idioms, such as figuration and abstraction, or concreteness and sensuality, can be attributed to an acute awareness he developed regarding the innumerable potentials of materiality and materials.
A trademark form of Himmat’s, the heads, consisted of an ingenuous mixture of the iconic, the symbolic, and the everyday. These and other forms which are neither figurative nor entirely abstract in the conventional sense, have made it difficult to bracket him under a single stylistic register or given art historical categories.
For his prolific practice and immense contribution to the field of art and culture, Himmat Shah received the Kalidas Samman (2004) and Sahitya Kala Parishad Samman (1988). His life-work was celebrated in the retrospective exhibition ‘Hammer on the Square’ (curated by Roobina Karode, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2016).
It falls to future art historians to excavate the layers of his artistic oeuvre, and develop new conceptual vocabularies that resist conventional categories. With a renewed interest in materiality and affect, Himmat Shah’s artistic practice may find a new lease of life in the years to come.
Based in New Delhi, Sneha Ragavan is senior researcher and head of Asia Art Archive in India