Important Notice

Somnath Hore turned to sculpting several decades into his career as an artist and teacher, and that too quite by accident. In his autobiographical notes, published in Bengali in 1992 as Amar Chitrabhabna, 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... Somnath Hore turned to sculpting several decades into his career as an artist and teacher, and that too quite by accident. In his autobiographical notes, published in Bengali in 1992 as Amar Chitrabhabna, 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 the theme of 'wounds', a manifestation of the personal and collective experiences of pain that have deeply influenced his work from the early 1940s onwards. According to Yashodhara Dalmia, the artist's bronzes transport the figures of his drawings and graphic works to the next level of experience. "Hore's figuration has always reflected the anguished human body. His sculpture is no different but the imprint of the hand of the creator is more startlingly manifest in his sculptures. The torn and rugged surfaces, tough planes with slits and holes, subtle modeling and axial shifts, exposed channels, all make for exciting visual and tactile sculptures" ("Somnath Hore", Indian Contemporary Art Post Independence, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1997, p. 152).

Hore's small and unique bronze figures of humans and animals are haunting rather than "...heroic or monumental. They are neither romantic, nor lyric. Instead, they are expressive of the basic concerns of ordinary people - a right to a life of dignity" (Ella Datta, Agony and Ecstasy, Gallery Espace exhibition catalogue, 2007, not paginated). The artist's inventive use of rough textures and negative space emphasizes the tragedy of his figures. "Another distinctive feature of his sculptures is that huge areas of the animal and human forms are left hollow and the edges of the body structures are uneven, as if they had been roughly scissored. Thus the roughness and empty space within these sculptural forms help to accentuate the latent horror of pain and suffocation" (Shiladitya Sarkar, "A Finger in the Wound", Art India, Vol. V, Issue III, 2000, p. 25).

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