Himmat Shah's heads: at the apex of his investigation into the human condition

Indian Express

a day ago

Renowned for his experimentation with material and form, Himmat Shah's studio in Jaipur was a laboratory in which he would use disparate tools, found objects and mitti (clay), that he personally ground by hand and soaked in water for years, to make art.
His signature creations were elongated and abstracted human heads, which were distorted yet expressive. First making an appearance in the mid 1970s, these heads were reimagined in a range of diverse mediums, from terracotta and bronze to intricate pen and ink drawings that Shah was working on up until his passing in March this year.
'In modern Indian art, his head sculptures stand out as distinctive and pioneering, with their pronounced features, intense eyes and a compelling tactile and gestural quality achieved through the exploration of their texture,' Mamta Singhania, director, Anant Art Gallery, told The Indian Express.
She added, 'Treating them as silent witnesses to history and conflict, he imbued them with a certain timelessness, reminiscent of excavated artefacts.'
From childhood memories
Born in 1933 into a Jain mercantile family in Lothal, Gujarat, Shah was always an artistically-inclined child. In an interview to The Indian Express in 2024, he recalled how he would often sit with potters to learn their craft, and return home with clay objects that he created for his grandmother.
His distinguished stylised heads too were inspired by his childhood, with Shah attributing the form to memories of playing in the pond with friends.
'I did not know how to swim, so I would just sit and watch. As they dived in, their heads emerged from the water at first — that image stayed with me,' Shah said in the interview, adding that the textured and uneven surfaces of his sculptures mirrored the terrain of dried-up pond beds.
Experimenting with material
It was in the mid-1970s, at the Garhi Studios in Delhi, that Shah made his first sculpture of a head. By this time, he had already gained somewhat of a reputation as a maverick, whose monumental murals and charred paper collages — made by burning holes on paper with cigarettes — had caught the attention of many a connoisseur, including the late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Shah often recalled how his first head, made of clay, was fired by fellow sculptor PR Daroz. Soon, Shah began experimenting more frequently with the form, using earth (terracotta) sourced from the potter's colony near the railway station.
'For almost two years, I photographed every sculpture I created to understand the nuances of its expression. Living alone in that small room at Garhi, I would work all day and sometimes even wake up at night to continue. My teachers instilled in me the belief that our goal should always be to create something new. The material guides me and I follow,' Shah said in 2024.
While he developed his own slip-casting technique for terracotta and ceramic, some of his earliest plaster heads were also reportedly immersed in linseed oil to harden, and then overlaid with silver-foil. Later he also began casting in bronze, producing some of his bronze heads at a foundry in London.
In his 2017 essay 'Internationalism: The Determined Strength in Himmat Shah's Art', art critic Arjun Kumar Singh wrote, '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 object.'
In her 2007 essay 'An Unreasoned Act of Being: New Sculptures by Himmat Shah' on the website Critical Collective, art critic and curator Gayatri Sinha wrote: 'Himmat Shah's suite of large heads comes at the apex of his investigation of the human condition.'
'In his contraction of head, ancient presences are suggested, like atavistic shadows. More accurately, Himmat arrives at what [artist] Nilima Sheikh describes as 'the projective voluptuousness of the image.' Here, as the artist perceives it, the head, the phallus and the pillar all the same; the sculpture gains its vitality not in its definition, but in the process of arriving at a form,' Sinha wrote.
Shah's work appears to echo the passage of civilizations, perhaps recalling early migrations between Africa and India. After all, the artist himself was born in Lothal, the great port of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which is said to have links to Mesopotamia.
Gayatri wrote: 'Occasionally divested of features, they present models of classical introversion, of the gaze turned inward, still and contemplative… Stubborn and unrelenting, these heads become expressive of a state of resistance, one that bears the marks of isolation perhaps, but also of a commitment to life and endurance.'