SOMNATH Hore was a national award winning printmaker and sculptor whose works featured the human form like few others. Hore was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh.
He turned sculptor by accident when he was 53 years old! In 1974, Hore playfully created figures with lumps of wax discarded by students of sculpture at Kala Bhavan, Shantiniketan. One of the students cast them in bronze. Then on, Hore became fascinated with creating bronzes.
In May 1975, Hore began designing a bronze sculpture of a Mother with Child to commemorate Vietnam’s victory over USA. Two-and-a-half laborious years later, on the very night Hore completed his sculpture weighing almost 40 kg, the statue was stolen from the Kala Bhavan. The episode left him very dejected.
Hore is best known for his sketches of the 1943 Bengal famine titled Janayuddha (People’s War) and the 1946 peasant unrest in Tebhaga, Bengal. Hore’s work was characterised by its simplicity. He evolved a distinct style of depicting elongated suffering human figures.