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Lot 73

 

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Somnath Hore always displayed an interest in art, but the major event that gave impetus to the artist in him was his association with the communist party of India in the early 1940s. This connection, which prompted him to design and produce posters to support party activities, not only shaped his initial narrative concerns, but also gave him the opportunity to meet with eminent artists like Chittoprasad and Zainul Abedin. On their encouragement,... Somnath Hore always displayed an interest in art, but the major event that gave impetus to the artist in him was his association with the communist party of India in the early 1940s. This connection, which prompted him to design and produce posters to support party activities, not only shaped his initial narrative concerns, but also gave him the opportunity to meet with eminent artists like Chittoprasad and Zainul Abedin. On their encouragement, he joined art school and committed to his artistic practice in a definite manner.

The 1940s and 50s were decisive decades for Hore. The Bengal Famine of 1943, the Tebhaga peasant movement, and increasing dissent in his environs prompted the artist to dedicate his artistic endeavours to articulating his response to human suffering. His later series of works titled Wounds extended this dedication. These white on white prints, which literally looked like wounds inflicted on sheets of paper, also proved to be the stepping stones leading Hore to work with bronze. The artist recalls that it was in the summer of 1974 that he first started modeling with the wax discarded by students of the sculpture department at Santiniketan. Some of the students saw his wax models and decided to cast them in bronze, a fairly painstaking process, but one that proved successful.

Through his 'bronzes', a descriptor he preferred over 'sculptures', Hore continued to explore wounds, or the manifestation of personal and collective experiences of pain that deeply influenced his work from the early 1940s onwards. Speaking about these works, he noted "I prefer not to call them sculptures. They do not have volume, mass or even weight, they bear the scars of wounds. They are wounds. The ten fingers of the hand manipulate them. They are small, done without the help of armatures. Each figure stands or rests on its own, with its own logical structure. This method of working directly from sheets of wax is not suited to large works. I feel more at ease doing small pieces which are mostly mono -products, with no duplication, since the piece mould technique cannot be applied here" ("Wounds", Somnath Hore: Bronzes, CIMA exhibition catalogue, 1995, p. 16).

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