138-139 / 168
138
139PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION, MUMBAI
77
HIMMAT SHAH
(b. 1933)
Untitled
Dated and signed '06 / HIMMAT' (on the left edge of the base)
2006
Bronze
Height: 34.75 in (88.5 cm)
Width: 12.25 in (31 cm)
Depth: 11.25 in (28.7 cm)
Rs 10,00,000 ‒ 15,00,000
$ 14,930 ‒ 22,390
Second from a limited edition of five
PROVENANCE:
Acquired directly from the artist
PUBLISHED:
Gayatri Sinha ed.,
An Unreasoned Act of Being: Sculptures by Himmat Shah
,
Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2007, pp. 19‒21 (illustrated)
Himmat Shah behind his book titled
High Relief
. Gurgaon, October 2014
Image courtesy of Manisha Gera Baswani
Himmat Shah’s bronze and terracotta
sculptures have a monumental presence.
A multi-disciplinary artist, Shah immersed
himself in many mediums before focussing on
sculptures. He worked with terracotta and later
moved to cast bronze, creating a distinctive
vocabulary that harks back to ancient
civilizations while also being timeless. He is
best known for his sculptures of heads, often
marked by lines and hatches. “On their bodies
appear marks like those of journeys of the past,
like a trail etched out across the Hindukush
mountains or the salt flats of Gujarat, perhaps,
tread by weary travellers as they traverse a
death-defying trajectory. Or, perhaps, they are
mammoth puzzles of the human condition
and its existential states that defy simple
definition.” (Gayatri Sinha,
An Unreasoned Act
of Being
, Aldershot: Mapin Publishing, Lund
Humphries, 2007, p. 11)