A brief history lesson on Shah’s practice is, in my opinion, important to understanding his works. He was born in Lothal, Gujarat, which was significant in shaping his sensibilities. Memories of archaeologists and historians from across the world visiting his village, which was close to the archeological site of Harappa in Pakistan, have influenced Shah’s works. His visits to a nearby potter’s kiln as a child, and making toys with his own mother, also had a deep impact. After training as a drawing teacher at the JJ School of Art, Mumbai, in 1962 he helped found an artist’s group called Group 1890—a short-lived movement that tried to find a modern Indian art aesthetic based on Pahari miniature paintings, colors, Indian folk art and mysticism. That same year, Shah traveled to Delhi, where he lived with friends until he eventually settled at the Lalit Kala Garhi Artist Studio in the mid-1970s.

Shah’s work in the early 1960s included wonderfully colored paper juxtaposed against singed and burnt paper collages with fragile, charred edges that dispersed ashen dust. In 1965, Shah traveled to Paris to study design, but dropped out soon after. Instead, what he fully explored in Paris was the depths of European modernism, visiting numerous museums and engaging with the work of Henri Rousseau, Constantin Brâncuși and Alberto Giacometti, among others. In 1967, he then studied at the city’s Atelier 17 under artists Stanley William Hayter and Krishna Reddy, where he learned printmaking, lithography and etching.

Between 1967 and 1971, Shah also conceptualized, designed and executed three 18-by-20-foot walls in brick, concrete and cement at the Saint Xavier School in Ahmadabad, one of which featured 40 relief murals. By the mid-1970s, Shah had started working on sculpture, creating heads that he immersed in linseed oil until they hardened, and then covered with silver foil to make them look like relics of ageless deities. In approaching the mid-1980s, he formed the style that he continues today, covering an array of objects made of plaster, ceramic and terracotta with silver and gold-leaf to give them the appearance of shrines, deities and votive objects.

The next room, which contains Shah’s etchings and linocuts from the 1960s, showcase his early potential in drawing. They are funny, impactful and masterfully detailed. In his later etchings and drawings—like one which shows a man sucking a straw and another that features a haystack against a yellow background—objects appear to be both protected by and covered in bits of debris, displaying a sculptor’s sensitivity and meticulousness toward form-building and a draftsman’s astute attention to the fine subtleties of line. Meanwhile, the aforementioned photographs of Shah’s pyre-like structures show that his mind is constantly looking to reinvent the motifs that he explores in his works.

The last few rooms of the exhibition show Shah’s recent sculptures, which are quieter and more contemplative. Large bronze sculptures fill one room while small objects in another space highlight Shah’s preoccupation with terracotta. Some of the objects feature clay folded in on itself, creating shapes that are sensuous and tactile. Others have shapes that are vaguely familiar: a teapot that looks like an elephant, and an object that is reminiscent of a water pump. There is also a plant seed that Shah picked up and kept with himself for a long time, until one day he covered it with gold foil and made it into a votive object.

Some of the most noted pieces that Shah has worked on in his career, like his large drawing Man’s Fate (c. 1960s), are not a part of his retrospective at Kiran Nadar. Nonetheless, the exhibition effectively showcases the excess, voluptuousness, sensuality and spirituality that the nomadic and rebellious artist has been imparting onto his art. As the curator writes, the show “highlights key ideas in Himmat Shah’s works: fragility and transience of existence, the heightened relationship between ephemeral layers and stasis, his intense connect and understanding of materials and the material world, and echoes of lost civilizations and cultures.”

It is a pleasure to see the 82-year-young artist hold court to the younger artists of today, allowing creativity to fill and flow through his body. Shah has worn many hats over the years and he continues to exhilarate viewers of his work.

Himmat Shah’s “Hammer On the Square” is on view at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, until July 20, 2016.