Reba Hore (1926–2008) was an Indian artist and activist. She has worked in various
mediums ranging from water colors, mixed media, oil paints, pastels to terracotta.[1] Her
artworks were spontaneous, deeply personal and rooted in her daily life experiences. She
was the wife of Somnath Hore, an accomplished sculptor and print maker himself.
Reba had completed her graduation in economics and became a member of the Communist
Party in 1948. Later, she joined the Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata. After
completing her studies, she started teaching art at St. John’s Diocesan School from 1951. It
was three years later, when she married Somnath Hore in 1954.
She lived and worked in different cities, namely Kolkata, New Delhi and Shantiniketan over
the course of her life. Hore passed away in 2008.
Reba Hore’s works describe her emotional responses to the stimuli of her day-to-day life
experiences. These stimuli might be as simple as the animals in her courtyard, the everyday
lives of the people, and the folk zest of the Shantiniketan where she had spent her entire
life. In other cases, they might be the spine-chilling and emotional portrayal of momentous
human tragedies like the Bengal famine, which was contemporary to her times.
The depictions in her paintings are deeply introspective comprehensions of the universal
human drama. It reminds us, time and again, that ‘no man is an island’. Hore’s work was
universal which made her an artist of the people. She was also a preeminent creator and
a master of the strong descriptive line. The lines & colors in her dry pastels & mixed media
works seem to be hastily put together. Yet with a few apparently rough and spontaneous
strokes, she evokes an entire emotional universe.
