“Reba Hore is an artist who brings to us the truth and the beauty of the transient tenderness that surrounds the physical world which we miss while busying ourselves with what we call hard-core reality.”
— R. Siva Kumar, Reba Hore: Reality in a Tender Light, 1988–89
Born in 1926, Reba Hore studied at Calcutta University and later graduated from the Calcutta College of Art (now the Government College of Art & Craft) in 1949. Though trained within an academic framework, she soon departed from its tonal discipline to develop her own distinct language. Early exposure to the political movements of the 1940s shaped her sensibility, leading her to join the Communist Party for nearly a decade. Yet her art remained separate from
agitprop or ideological expression; it sought beauty and empathy amid the weight of suffering.
Hore’s early paintings mark the beginning of her exploration of structure, balance, and the expressive possibilities of form. Here, figures emerge from within fractured planes of colour, suggesting a detachment from the subjects they represent. By the late 1960s, as seen in works from 1967 and 1969, her approach intensified: the paint surface became dense and tactile, referring to the act of painting itself rather than to external representation.
In later decades, Hore’s practice grew more atmospheric and gestural. Colours dictated her compositions, transforming space and evoking the play of light across form. Her own reflections describe this evolving tension between image and abstraction: “As the core theme develops in colour construction, the image tends to take an abstract
shape... The image is not lost altogether. It peeps through and becomes a part of all this.”
— Reba Hore, Other Writings, 1996, archived at Only Connect
Her late works from the 1980s through the early 2000s exemplify a shift in material from oil to crayon, pastels, wax, and occasionally terracotta—changes that reflected both physical necessity and a widening of her expressive range. The exhibition includes a few examples from this phase, where her use of pastels in mixed-media compositions demonstrates her continued engagement with texture and material experimentation.
Form and Memory: Reba Hore in Retrospect brings together paintings made over four decades, mapping Hore’s shift from representation toward abstraction. These works reflect her sustained engagement with the possibilities of form, colour, and texture, and the ways in which memory and experience inform the act of painting.
