Untitled

Somnath Hore

The threat of aerial bombings during World War II, the Bengal famine, and the struggle for national independence formed the backdrop of Somnath Hore’s childhood and youth. His experience with death and suffering had such a profound impact on him that his artistic vision throughout his life had a shadow of suffering looming over it. He experimented with a variety of techniques and mediums, but whether it was painting, print or sculpture, the central thematic tenet of his work was to expose the piteous nature of the human condition. In this work, he experimented with psychological abstraction, creating a mirror-like image reminiscent of Rorschach’s test. Unlike the ink-blot test, where one side is an impression of the ink blots from the other side, the lithograph is not a partial mirror image but has been deliberately made to appear so.

When one looks at it closely, minute differences begin to appear. The eyes are immediately drawn towards the feet, and the only visible part is the exposed soles. The arrow-like lines are perhaps the bombs falling from the sky, the real-life image embedded in Hore’s memory from the bombing of his home district, Chittagong, by the Japanese Royal Air Force in 1942. Do the feet belong to someone who was killed or injured by the bombing? Even in abstraction, Hore managed to create an atmosphere of melancholy, exposing the sad reality of everyday life in the world he lived in.