Himmat Shah

Himmat Shah was born in Lothal, Gujarat, in 1933 and grew up surrounded by the remains of an Indus Valley port. He moved to Bhavnagar as a boy and studied at Gharshala, a school attached to Dakshinamurti, where the artist and educator Jagubhai Shah first drew him into art. He went on to the J. J. School of Art in Bombay and then, on a government cultural scholarship, to Baroda from 1956 to 1960, where he learnt from N. S. Bendre and K. G. Subramanyan. He was a member of Group 1890, the short-lived collective founded by J. Swaminathan whose only show was opened by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1963. A French government scholarship, on the recommendation of Octavio Paz, took him to Atelier 17 in Paris in 1967 to study etching under S. W. Hayter and Krishna Reddy. Back in India, from 1967 to 1971, he made monumental murals in brick, cement and concrete at St Xavier's School, Ahmedabad, then reliefs in plaster, the silver paintings, and sculpture in terracotta and bronze. At the Garhi studios in Delhi he experimented with clays and slips until he had a terracotta language of his own. His bronzes of 2004 and 2005 were cast in London. The heads, in terracotta and bronze, remain his best-known work. He has worked from a studio in Jaipur since 2000.