India Art Fair 2026: Marks and Memories Carved in Wood: The Woodcuts of Somnath Hore

“When I started drawing things like war, famine and riots, those were a reality before my eyes. And they have come into my work. Then, the medium which I had selected… that was somewhere similar, in the sense… like when I do woodcutting… digging the wood with a chisel or while burning the plate with some acid are also a kind of wound. So, the past, the experience and the mediums meet at a point of culmination and take you somewhere…”

(Cheeroth, M.(November 7, 2021) “Why Somnath Hore, one of India’s finest 20th century artists, refused to leave India”. In The Sunday Eye,  The Indian Express, Delhi)

The surface is rough, the lines carved deep. One sees at once the pressure of the hand, the resistance of the wood. Somnath Hore’s woodcuts do not invite admiration; it demands attention. They record suffering, absence, and survival. The artist pares down the body, to its almost skeletal form, yet each mark carries weight. There is no decoration here, only the insistence of reality.

Somnath Hore (1921-2006) woodcut speaks without artifice. The wood’s grain, the black ink pressed into it, the repeated impressions—these became a language of witness. Hunger, violence, displacement: these are not illustrated, but inscribed into the surface. The labour of the hand and the presence of the body are sensed in every gesture on the wood block.

Hore does not separate art from life; the one testifies to the other. The image is simple, but its ethical gravity is immense. It is modernism stripped of spectacle, modernism as memory and responsibility. The work lingers because it refuses to let the viewer forget what has been endured.