HIMMAT SHAH
Anant Art Gallery, 2005
Catalogue Essay: Roobina Karode
Here is an artist in no hurry. He leisurely gazes at his universe, intoxicated with life around-flowers and bees, birds and animals, and equally pebbles, rocks, tress, broken branches, earthenware and manmade structures. This is Himmat Shah, the well-known and yest unknowable artist, whose art and life are solitary exemplar of the true modernist artist-self styled, idiosyncratic and charismatic, lonely and loyal only to his art. A nomad, a traveler, a collector of things that captivate his attention, he indulges with the phenomenology of experience. Not speaking about the art object, he is obsessed with the creative act. Drawing analogies between bhakti and creativity, he belives it takes an age, even a lifetime for the self to get awakened to a heightened state of awareness and a rare artistic consciousness.
(excerpt from the catalogue essay ‘Excavations:Evocations, Terracotta sculptures by Himmat Shah’ by Roobina Karode)