FRIEZE SEOUL 2026

BOOTH : S03

For the Spotlight section at Frieze Seoul 2026, Art Exposure presents a focused selection of paintings by Reba Hore spanning the late 1960s through the 1980s, tracing a significant shift within the artist’s practice from figuration toward abstraction. Bringing together works in oil, pastel, crayon, and mixed media, the presentation foregrounds Hore’s sustained engagement with surface, materiality, and gesture as sites through which memory and subjective experience are negotiated.

Emerging from the politically charged milieu of 1940s Bengal, Hore’s early formation was shaped by her proximity to leftist cultural movements and an acute awareness of social precarity and displacement. While her practice initially remained tethered to the human figure and the observed world, the works produced from the late 1960s onward register a gradual withdrawal from descriptive representation. Figures fragment, dissolve, or recede altogether, giving way to densely worked surfaces animated by layered pigment, scratched marks, and chromatic tension.

Rather than embracing abstraction as a purely formal proposition, Hore approached it as an affective and psychological condition. Her paintings retain the residue of lived experience: traces of bodies, interiors, landscapes, and emotional states persist beneath sedimented surfaces and gestural accumulations. Colour operates atmospherically rather than symbolically, while texture becomes a structuring device through which intimacy, rupture, and memory are held in suspension.