Wounds 37

Studying briefly at the Government School of Art, Calcutta (now Kolkata), in the mid-1940s, Somnath Hore trained under the artist Zainul Abedin, and, later, the printmaker Safiuddin Ahmed. Hore chose a distinctly formal, Western style of artmaking, distinguished by its strong linear quality, and guided by humanist concerns as much as the need to depict the catastrophe-enduring figure. The 1943 Bengal famine and 1946 Tebhaga peasant uprising marked him, reappearing constantly in his works. 1968 onwards, Hore began to develop his unique mix of technical virtuosity and physical tactility, rendering such inflicted ‘wounds’ upon paper. His monochromatic pulp-prints, comprising of delicate marks on expansive white space, with occasional, wispy touches of reds and/or blacks, are rightly celebrated for their perfect synthesis of technology and affect, realized in such a stark fashion.