REBA HORE

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know how to light a fire?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know how to put it out?’

‘Only a small one.’

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Experimenter presents Do You Know How To Start a Fire, a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Reba Hore at Experimenter – Hindustan Road. The title of the exhibition is excerpted from a conversation between Reba Hore and Naveen Kishore in 2006.

Rooted in an impassioned and spontaneous visual language, Hore drew from her everyday field of vision. Her works bring forth a gaze stemming from an entangled knot of experiences that subverted the conventional understanding of her interior world. The mundane, dailyness of domestic life often seen as inferior and redundant—as the binary opposites of the intellectual and cerebral exercises in the public world, takes on a directional change in her works. While the forms, figures and landscapes remain almost indiscernible and abstract, Hore’s work encapsulates a fiery self-reflexiveness. As the title suggests, Hore holds within her practice the embers of a quiet and controlled fire. She articulates a perspective which is uniquely and unapologetically her own—a sense of agency brimming with an unfettered abandon.

In Hore’s words ‘As a person, I am dependent on my feelings, I am emotional. My paintings have a lot of spontaneity about them. There is a concept, a theme, which arises from what I see around me, from what in that moves me. But it only arises as a motive, a goal, an aim.’ In a world predicated on the normative expectation of being productive at ordained hours, Hore’s works are also a testament to taking agency of one’s own time and energy to negotiate with the inner self and one’s surroundings, while transforming it into an intimate and radical act, animated with a sense of liberation and fulfilment.

Reba Hore (1926–2008) was educated at Calcutta University and Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata. Hore completed her graduation in Economics and became an active member of the Communist Party and was involved in student movements from a formative age. She lived and worked in Kolkata, New Delhi, and in Santiniketan.