Himmat Shah: Himmat in Stone

This book of Himmat Shah’s sculptures in stone is a culmination of a sequence of sculptures inspired by his experiential and evocative solitary journey built upon a long sequence of minimalist, organic heads—radical in their formal purity—that defines the artist’s odyssey for well over six decades. All set in stone largely from mines in Rajasthan, made from his maquettes, bronze and clay models, they echo the inner rhythms of the contemplative pose—the pared down, internalized gaze, with man as his inspiration, an embodiment of the artistic process itself.

Himmat’s is a radical new language of form that has cemented his reputation and unravelled his genius. Intriguing how we sense the revolutionary ripple of creating heads in which the human features are entirely eradicated, leaving only the elemental, elongated human head that appears in multiple versions in marble and sandstone. It is the minimalist austere heads with suggestive anatomical features— the expression of pared-down solidity, and the abstracted features—that initiate a sequence of elegant, elegiac references that form a central theme of Himmat’s oeuvre.