Untitled

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, Safiuddin Ahmed, the printmaker. A participatory, collective practice with fellow artists like Chittaprosad led to his intellectual growth. In a thirty-year teaching career, he set up the printmaking department of the Delhi Polytechnic of Art, and nurtured students at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, the fine arts department of Visva-Bharati University, established by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. His etchings on handmade paper explored some of the traumas of those decades, when violence overwhelmed the imagination of political freedom. In this image, the act of violence entangles two bodies into an intimate encounter- so that we are hard-pressed to distinguish between the aggressor and the victim.