Past Exhibition

The Unhealing Wound: A Centenary Show in Honour of Somnath Hore

‘What I draw is the unfolding of my being – which in my case is inscribed as ‘wounds’.

– Somnath Hore

The years 2020-22, which have gone down in history as the era of the Covid pandemic, social isolation and conflict, became for me a time of connections and productivity thanks to the man I called “Somnath da”, as I set out curate a centenary exhibition in his memory. Though I was not formally a student of Somnath Hore, from my early student years in Kala Bhavana, I was given the precious gift of a close bond with him.

Back in the 1970s, I worked in a studio which was right below his own studio space, and our regular chats revealed to me the profoundly emotional man behind the now-legendary artist. Later, in my visits to Santiniketan, I met him and was privileged to witness his deep involvement with his work coupled with his complete disregard for his own achievements and status.

This exhibition is a tribute to Somnath Hore’s extraordinarily empathetic and emotional nature, which witnessed the Second world war, the Bengal famine, the quiet suffering of the peasants, workers, and destitute whom he documented… and made their pain the mainstay of his art forever. Everything around me, he said, seemed to be “intimations of only one subject matter – the helpless, the rejected, the hungry… a wound that would not heal”.

In the early 1970s, the artist started making white-on-white paper pulp prints (he made the paper himself) from clay or wax sheets which he cut and slashed minimally. These were ‘wounds’, he said and se saw them everywhere: “The ruts left on the road by wheels, the cut from the axe on the side of the tree, the injuries on the human body left by weapons.” With ‘wounds’ his work evolved into a most direct experience of art. Instead of depicting human or animal figures as objects of suffering he was, as if, making himself and us participate in the suffering itself. He brought us face to face with the wound. After that, Somnath Hore described whatever he worked on, including his small bronze sculptures, Wounds.

Through his creative life, Somnath Hore worked across many mediums and there is no stagnation at all in his creative arc: he constantly evolved from an activist’s propaganda-oriented woodcuts to explorations of etching, colour intaglio or lithography, and eventually to abstract paper-pulp prints and bronze sculptures. But, at the same time, there is never a rupture in his theme and his emotional concerns. His commitment to demonstrating the pain of the marginalized and the oppressed remained constant, even deepened, and found newer modes of expression.

Through his Wounds, Somnath Hore never forgot, nor will he let us forget, that this world and its conflicts stand on the starved hollowed bodies, the bowed backs, the empty eyes of those whose humanity is denied to them.

– KS Radhakrishnan – Sculptor, Curator

To view ‘Unhealing WOUNDS’ E-catalogue: Click here