The Ouevre of Somnath Hore: Wounds that refused to Heal/Wounds that he refused to Heal

Speaker: Sanjoy K. Mallik

January 24, 2007 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

“What do I paint?
Expression of my own self, revolving around the one concept -Wounds.”
– Somnath Hore

It is well known by now that for an artist like Somnath Hore, ‘wounds’ as a theme and a motif became a recurring persistence, yet that did not lead to a diminishing impact of the experience or the relevance of the concern. As R. Siva Kumar pointed out, the artist “struggles to save it from melting into memory and nostalgia and give it the quality of an ageless vision. By analogy, he turns every new experience into some further confirmation of the ‘first’ anguish…..” In varying degrees in Somnath Hore’s sculptures, prints and paintings, besides the haunting sight of an anguished struggle, there is a simultaneous possibility of endurance, whereby all is not altogether bleak. The work-process allows technicalities to lead on to a more forceful statement of sensitive emotive contents, rescuing them from immediate topicality, thereby harnessing experience into expression.

Dr. Sanjoy Kumar Mallik is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati (Santiniketan). His essays have appeared in art history journals like Nandan (Visva Bharati, Santiniketan), Bichitra (Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata) and the Lalit Kala Contemporary (New Delhi), and he has contributed a modest section on the art of the nineteen-forties to the publication Indian Art: an overview” (Rupa & Co.2004). He is currently engaged in authoring a comprehensive book on the artistic oeuvre of Chittaprosad, the publication of which is targeted to coincide with a touring retrospective exhibition of the artist in early 2007.