A Kolkata Exhibition Will Shed Light On Late Artist Reba Hore's Enduring Untold Legacy

In the late 1990s, my mother Sumita Maity — an economist by education — left her job as a teacher and came to Kolkata to become a painter. She was in her early 30s at the time. Here, she met my father Somenath Maity — already a working artist by then — fell in love with him, got married, and had children. It was only in 2003, almost a decade after she had made the move to Kolkata that she had her first solo exhibition. Four years after that, she won the All India Fine Arts & Crafts Society Award in 2007. She would not have another solo exhibition until 2017, a year after my parents’ separation. During this lost decade of my mother's career, my father — unhindered by domestic and parental responsibilities — would continue to show his work in India, Europe, Singapore, Japan, and the US. In 2011, Saffron Art, one of India’s leading fine art auction houses, called him “one of Bengal’s important new emerging painters."

My mother is not an exception. From Françoise Gilot to Lee Krasner, for many women artists — especially those married to other, more established artists — their career trajectory looks eerily similar. It is widely known that women outnumber men in art school but are underrepresented in museums, galleries, and auction houses. According to the Global Art Market Report 2019 by Art Basel/UBS, of the 3,050 international galleries in the Artsy database, 10% represent not a single woman artist, while only 8% represent more women than men. Almost half represent 25% or fewer women. The truth is that women have never been treated equally in the art world, and to this day they remain dramatically underrepresented and undervalued in museums, galleries, and auction houses.

Although it may appear that India is an exception to this phenomenon, with many major artists like Amrita Sher-Gil, Gogi Saroj Pal, Anjolie Ela Menon, Mrinalini Mukherjee, and Nalini Malini, who identified as women, there exist many obscure artists like my mother who are overlooked and unrecognised by the art world. Until recently, Reba Hore (b. 1926 – d. 2008) was one of them.

Largely overshadowed by her husband — the late artist Somnath Hore — during her lifetime, Reba Hore was an artists’ artist. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Hore studied fine arts at the prestigious Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata, where she met her future husband Somnath. In 1967, the Hores moved to Santiniketan, and this had a huge impact on Reba Hore’s artistic practice.

In the 60s and 70s, Kala Bhavana — the famed fine arts faculty of Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan — was the epicentre of the Indian art scene. With key figures like Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, and Benode Bihari Mukherjee working and teaching in the campus, Kala Bhavana was open to all working artists, and this allowed Hore to interact closely with the students and other artists working there, leading to experimentation and improvisation in her own practice.

Largely relegated to running a household with a small child, dealing with her busy and difficult husband, and balancing all that with her own work, she drew inspiration from the everyday domesticity of her interior life and made expressionistic, emotional oil paintings on large canvases. Big, bold, and colourful with broad brush strokes, Hore’s paintings from this period are extremely personal reflections of her own life and depict women working in domestic settings like the kitchen.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, Hore's paintings took on a more abstract, surreal quality. An allergic reaction to oil paints led her to switch mediums, and she began using wax-based oil sticks, pastels, and watercolour instead. Mostly done on paper and board, the paintings and drawings from this period exhibit a more spontaneous approach to mark-making. While the forms, figures, and landscapes become more indiscernible and abstract, Hore’s work encapsulates a fiery self-reflexiveness rooted in an impassioned and spontaneous visual language. An artistic gaze unlike any other emerges from an entangled knot of experiences; ever-changing and ever-growing. Hore’s works are a testament to taking agency of one’s own time and energy to negotiate with both your inner self and your surroundings and transforming it into an intimate and radical act that is animated with a sense of liberation and fulfilment.

Art history can be limiting, in that, while it does give us some insight into the movements, the works, and the artists who have come before us, it ultimately presents a narrow, exclusive image of the art world and the world of art. Why? Because the record-keepers — the great purveyors or artistic merit and taste — often seemingly forget or overlook certain groups or individuals and their contributions due to their race, gender, ethnicity, political beliefs, or other arbitrary aspects of their identity.

Reba Hore passed away in 2008, largely overlooked and unrecognised by the art world. A series of retrospective solo exhibitions since then, however, have shed light on her creative legacy as a major Indian multidisciplinary artist.

While we cannot undo the past, we can work towards building a more equitable art world by celebrating the works of artists who were neglected or marginalised because of their identity during their careers. It is important that homegrown art galleries take up the baton and lead that charge. ‘Do You Know How To Start a Fire’, a solo exhibition of rare paintings and works on paper by Reba Hore, in collaboration with Seagull, Calcutta, is currently on display at Experimenter.

About The Artist

Reba Hore (b. 1926 – d. 2008) was educated at Calcutta University and Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata. Hore completed her graduation in Economics and became an active member of the Communist Party and was involved in student movements from a formative age. She lived and worked in Kolkata, New Delhi, and in Santiniketan.

‘Do You Know How To Start a Fire’, a solo exhibition of rare paintings and works on paper by Reba Hore, in collaboration with Seagull, Calcutta, is showing at Experimenter – Hindustan Road from September 25 to November 30, 2024.

Follow Experimenter and find out more here.

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