Akara Art

SOMNATH HORE

Akara Modern

1921 -2006

A pioneer of the twentieth-century modern art movement in India, Somnath Hore is recognized as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and social activist. Over the years, Hore boldly used his extraordinary talents as a graphic artist and printmaker to express his angst against the socio-political systems that bred acts of violence. He studied the formal Western style of artmaking, distinguished by its strong linear quality technique at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta.

The most poignant and powerful statement made by Somnath as an artist was his ‘Wounds’ Series - a series that depicted man’s bestiality towards his kind. His themes and sensibilities within his art reflected the artist’s experiences of violence and trauma. It was the cataclysmic decades of the 1940s – especially the Bengal Famine of 1943 and the Tebhaga peasant uprising of 1946 that shaped and moulded his consciousness as an artist. Throughout his career, Hore experimented with different printmaking techniques and materials, particularly lithography and Intaglio. Beginning in 1974, he also started making bronze sculptures of different scales. One of his largest sculpture, Mother and Child, paid tribute to the sufferings of the people of Vietnam, which was stolen from Kala Bhavan soon after he finished it.

Somnath Hore was a recipient of the Indian Civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan. During most of his later life, he lived at Santiniketan and taught at Kala Bhavana as a Graphic Art professor. A solo show, ‘HoreScope-Somnath Hore’ displaying Hore’s series of work was held at Akara in 2020.