New Delhi
Himmat Shah’s recent retrospective formed one third of a three-part showcase at the Kiran Nadar Museum. Like the other two artists featured in “Abstraction in Indian Modern Art 1960s Onwards,” Nasreen Mohammedi and Jeram Patel, Shah is associated with the Faculty of Fine Arts Baroda. His show, “Hammer on the Square,” considered his prolific output from 1957 to 2015. The title work, Hammer on the Square, consists of an unpretentious cube and a hammer with no hand holding it. This composition capturing gravity at work shows how two forms can exist in suspended isolation. Over the course of his career, Shah has experimented with numerous materials, from mud and terra cotta to bronze and paper marked with cigarette burns. He consistently demonstrates an ability to transform the mundane into the astounding. Monographs devoted to his work have been innovatively designed so that readers can feel the materials while looking at the photographs.…see the entire review in the print version of March’s Sculpture magazine.
