Somnath Hore s (1921-2006) body of work is of a very special pain and torment which may be traced in some measure to the conditions of the epoch he lived in. Hore to be sure, often trafficked in the violence of a depicted scene; spectacles of bestiality, mutilations and horror. But these are overly facile detours, detours that the artist himself judged severely and condemned. His refusal in his work to employ fixed categories, to explain human action both at the individual and social level also arose from his personal experiences- it is a violence of reaction and expression, a scream rent from terror; a residual vision he witnessed. Over six decades as a consummate printmaker, Somnath Hore steadfastly appreciated using limited means to send complex signals. In this sense he was an idealist, attempting to regain freshness, craft and intellect of early modernism, its beliefs and ideals. Somnath Hore took up wound as a motif in his art. He made pictorial and aesthetic sense out of a personal despair and its experience of torn an injured world depicting a kind of social realism. And yet the energy, intensity, romanticism and sensuousness of the way they are pressed together provide a celebratory transcendence of the subject matter.